Chapter Text
They were running out of hand sanitizer at the nurse's station. Marian pumped at the last of the dispenser fruitlessly. She blinked at the optical migraine that had been haunting the margins of her vision. A jagged, glowing stripe of cellophane crinkle that throbbed in time with the harsh, static screech of the EMS MEDCOM radio.
The ER at Bellevue-Midtown General Hospital was just blocks outside the radius of whatever psionic anomaly had frozen half of Manhattan. They had been overwhelmed for the last hour but things were finally starting to calm down enough for her to take a moment to think more broadly about what might be causing all this citywide chaos.
Marian squinted at the admissions tablet over Charge Nurse Marcus Delancey's shoulder. The nurses' station was decorated with artificial blue and orange flowers celebrating the latest basketball victory, but the garish colors seemed irreverent in the harried atmosphere. It was the ninth hour of her biweekly shift in the ninth ring of hell, an expected attrition for most full-time physicians at the hospital. As their on-call neuro specialist, she had seen almost a dozen patients in the last hour, all complaining of the same post-psionic symptoms.
“Auditory hallucinations, temporary catatonia in otherwise healthy individuals, nosebleeds,” Marcus read off the scrolling screen, his dark eyes tight with stress. “And every single one is reporting a distinct period of memory loss.”
“Whatever this is,” Marian said, shaking her head; the ER smelled like sanitizer and a little bit of vomit. “It seems to attack the way the brain interacts with itself; it has the ability to reorganize the electrical connectome in real time in anyone it wants.” Through her long years of medical school, her PhD in neurophysiology, and a half-decade in Bellevue's trenches, she had never seen a mass neurological event like this. “This is a very powerful mutant.”
Behind the nursing desk, a junior medical scribe stood frozen, staring blankly at the wall monitor. The Mayor’s press conference blared over the din of the ER.
“...assure you that federal agents are on the scene, and we are working to assess the extent of the damage...” “What is your administration doing about the influx of dangerous, unregulated mutants into the city, sir?” A reporter's voice cut through the broadcast. “We are doing our best to make sure this is a welcoming city for…”
“Turn that shit off.” A tired-looking NYPD officer leaned heavily against the nursing station and glared at the screen. "You know they say there are Omega Class mutants out there who can turn off the sun," he muttered. "I think they're all dangerous. Every last one of 'em should be locked up. Even Spider-Man almost got one of us killed. We need to ban these freaks."
“Hey! Get back to work!” Marcus barked at the paralyzed scribe, his usually gentle demeanor hardening and impatient. He shot a withering glare at the dusty cop. “And you are free to take a seat in the waiting room, officer.”
“Unfortunately, he may be right.”
A man with a sharp, neatly trimmed beard stepped out from the cluster of injured officers. His pristine suit was a stark, jarring contrast to the blood and dust of the ER.
“And who are you?” Marian snapped. A sharp spike of her migraine made the man’s face distort in a sickening, static wave.
“Agent P. Cleary.” He held up a badge. “Department of Damage Control. I am taking jurisdiction over this incident.”
“Right, just stay—” Marian was cut off by the sudden shout from the main ambulance bay. She shared a sharp glance with Marcus, whose brow furrowed.
“There was no inbound MEDCOM alert,” Marcus muttered. They both bolted from the nursing station.
Someone shrieked from the waiting area.
“Spider-Man!” a voice echoed before they even rounded the corner.
Everyone in the city knew the brilliant, iconic blue-and-red suit, and the effect of his appearance in the emergency room lobby created a ripple of shocked screams; their beloved meme, mascot, and hero was draped unconscious across the arms of a heavily armed man. Bright, arterial red dripped across the linoleum, smeared into a grisly abstract by heavy tactical boots. Spider-Man's head tilted back, and a dark, spreading stain saturated the fabric over his mouth.
For the briefest fraction of a second, the glowing cellophane crinkle of Marian’s migraine shifted. It overlaid him with an impossible, shimmering lattice of crackling current. It was as if an invisible, immensely heavy power was gripping his nervous system. She blinked hard, forcing the agonizing brightness away. She had no time for this.
A look of sickened guilt, raw and out of place, twisted the large man’s face as he adjusted the slack weight in his arms. The crude white skull painted on his tactical vest was stained a brownish-red. Onlookers were already pressing against the glass doors, phones rising.
“He’s been shot,” the man grated, his voice tight.
The moment of frozen shock shattered.
“Rigid board! Now!” Marcus bellowed, tearing past her with two orderlies, one of whom grabbed a yellow plastic spine board. “Drop him flat! Keep his c-spine in line!”
With gentle, trained hands, Marcus and an orderly guided the vigilante out of the large man's arms, pressing him onto the rigid plastic to protect his spinal cord. He thrashed weakly as he was restrained, choking on a spray of blood through the fabric of his mask.
“GSW to the posterior thorax! Trauma Bay Four! Go, go, go!” Marcus yelled, steering the board toward the resuscitation bays.
Dr. Meeker, the on-call anesthesiologist, sprinted out of Bay Two, his eyes wide. “Is that the real Spider-Man? Get that mask off; we need an airway!”
“The mask stays on until the curtains are closed, Meeker!” Marian ordered, suddenly aware of the pressing crowd and the swarm of red recording lights on watching cell phones. It was a blatant violation of protocol, an insane order in any other circumstance. But New York City had, at some point, come to a collective, unspoken agreement to protect their protector. She wouldn't be the one to break it in a crowded hallway, not with Agent Cleary already hovering like a vulture behind them.
Marian fell into step beside the moving board, her eyes locked on the large man striding beside them. His hands were sticky with the kid's blood. He held his arms slightly away from his body, as if they were still filled with more than thin air.
“Your name?” Marian snapped.
“Frank.” He didn't look at her. His eyes were locked on the boy's chest, his gloved hands folded limply on his chest, and for a moment he was far, far away.
“Frank,” she demanded, her voice cutting through the mechanical din of the ER. “Give me a MIST report.”
Frank stopped just outside the threshold of Bay Four as Marcus swung shut the pastel curtains. His jaw clenched tight, the military training overriding his shock.
“Fifty-caliber BMG,” Frank delivered the ballistics as if he did not believe his own words.
"Fucking hell," Marian whispered.
“Seven-fifty grain armor-piercing. Range was just over a klick. I shot him in the back twenty minutes ago. The round did not exit.”
"You shot him?" She confirmed, her eyes moving from the pair of Glocks he had slung under his arms to the security guards trailing behind them. “What’s his name?” Marian asked out of habit before checking herself. “I mean…”
“John Doe,” Frank lied flatly.
“Right.” She winced, deciding to pick her battles. They could worry about medical history once they had stabilized him. There was no way that a baseline human could survive that kind of injury for this long. She ran through what she knew about enhanced humans, genetic augmentation, and trauma responses, but couldn't come up with anything comforting to say on the spot. “We will do our best,” she promised with a curt nod.
The emergency department security officers, along with the beat cops, had finally caught up to them. They looked incredibly unhappy at the Punisher’s arsenal.
“Sir, you can’t be armed in here,” one of them meekly informed Frank as Marian ducked behind the curtain of Bay Four.
Inside the trauma bay, their patient had miraculously regained some sliver of panicked, wildly disoriented consciousness the second Dr. Meeker tried to peel up the bottom edge of his mask. He awakened with a pained, wet cough. With the small portion of strength that remained, he pushed Meeker's hands away, his chest heaving as he struggled for bubbling gasps of air.
“Push twenty of Etomidate and a hundred of Succinylcholine! I need an airway now!” Meeker yelled. He moved to the head of the bed, throwing his full weight over the young man’s shoulders to physically brace his head and neck, maintaining rigid c-spine immobilization against the patient's thrashing.
The room was a crowded, kinetic swarm of activity. On the left side, a nurse cursed loudly, her heavy steel trauma shears sparking and scraping against the carbon-nanotube weave of the suit, cutting in a jagged line. On the right, another nurse had managed to establish an IV into one exposed arm and hooked it into a rapid infuser. The machine whined like a jet engine, pressure-pumping pendulous bags of O-negative blood straight into the patient's veins.
“Jean?” Spider-Man groaned, choking for bubbling gasps of air. He arched his back in agony, kicking weakly. His grasping, gloved hand left bloody streaks down Marcus’s scrubs, his heels scraping against the plastic board.
“Let’s hope that rules out a spinal cord transection.” Marian threw her weight over his ankles to hold them down while Marcus deftly filled a syringe. “Double it,” she insisted, trying to calculate how to anesthetize a radioactive, superhuman metabolism. They didn’t cover this in med school.
“Forty of Etomidate? Doc?” Marcus warned, his hands freezing on the plunger, his dark eyes wide.
“That will kill him!” Meeker glared at her.
“No, it won’t,” she insisted, earning shocked looks from the surrounding nurses. “There’s something keeping him alive! Push it!”
Marcus’s gaze shifted from the vial in his gloved hands to the patient before him. As Meeker was finally able to peel the mask back, the battered face of a handsome man in his early twenties appeared. Caucasian and pale as a bloodless ghost, with brown eyes and curly dark hair matted down with sweat. His unfocused gaze slid across the faces above him in raw fear and dawning comprehension.
“You've been shot,” Marcus explained gently, pulling the stopper down to draw the massive dosage despite his skepticism. “I’m giving you something to put you under. Just try to breathe.”
As she watched Marcus’s skilled, dark hands press the sedative into the young man’s IV, the strange, shimmering aura that had haunted her all day flared violently. It swirled around his chest, pulsing with every heartbeat on the monitors, just as his eyes rolled back and his body went slack against the board.
“I have the airway,” Meeker announced instantly. With the patient paralyzed, he worked with the careful confidence of a professional, guiding an endotracheal tube through his vocal cords in one fluid, practiced motion. A nurse immediately attached a bag-valve mask to the tube, squeezing rhythmic breaths of oxygen into his lungs.
“Listen for placement,” Marian ordered, snapping a fresh pair of gloves over her bloody ones.
Meeker pressed his stethoscope to the left side of the young man’s chest, nodding. But as he slid the bell over to the right side, his expression darkened. “I’m not getting any breath sounds on the right.”
“Page Doctor Cordova in thoracic surgery.” Marian snapped, moving to the right side of the bed. Her eyes flickered up for a second, trailed with an ever-intensifying halo to where sensors read out his steadily falling vitals.
“He's going to crash.” Doctor Meeker shook his head. He reached up, grabbing the heavy handle of the ceiling-mounted Overhead Tube Crane and dragging the robotic X-ray arm directly over the patient's chest. With a digital blip, a stark black-and-white image materialized on the wall monitor.
“Fuck,” an intern whispered, instantly receiving a withering glare from Marcus. What she was seeing was impossible; the slug had pulverized on striking his ribcage like it had hit a brick wall.
“The round shattered the seventh, eighth, and ninth ribs anteriorly and is lodged in the intercostal space,” Meeker confirmed, pointing to the ballistic path on the screen. “He’s got a massive hemopneumothorax. We need to drain the blood and re-expand that lung, now.”
"Scalpel," Marian ordered.
She pressed her fingers hard between the ribs on his right side to find her landmark, but pushing into the intercostal muscle was like pushing through the cords of a steel cable. She pulled back, checked his anatomy, and confirmed that her placement was correct. She tried again, and it took all her strength to force the scalpel between his ribs until it popped through and dark blood gushed out over her hands. "Kelly clamp," she demanded, taking the blunt forceps and driving them into the incision to pull apart the fibers of thick intercostal muscle.
The lights in her eyes exploded, like a sweeping murmuration of glittering light - something was breathing for him.
“There’s something inside of him!” Marian confessed, freezing with her hand still inside his chest wall. She stared at the shimmering current clinging to his body. “I can see it and... and you might not be able to…” she stammered, glancing at the two men nervously. Was she going insane, or was the energy stopping the blood from his wound? “Something is giving us time! It’s helping!” she insisted. “Someone.” She looked between them; Marcus looked concerned, and Doctor Meeker looked annoyed.
“Are you feeling alright, Doc—” Marcus began to ask, but his body violently twitched.
The charge nurse’s eyes widened, glazing over in an instant, and the possessing spirit flowed into his mind like a sheet of clear, heavy water.
“I can’t keep his mind tied to his body for long,” the invisible entity said to them, using Marcus Delancey’s mouth. The voice was eerie, layered with a resonant, psychic weight that didn't belong to the charge nurse. “Work quickly.”
Marcus yelped in protest as the intrusive spirit suddenly separated itself, shaking his entire body. He blinked hard, looking wildly around the room, before gripping the edge of the stretcher as if nothing had happened.
Before anyone could process the impossible moment, the pastel privacy curtains were discreetly sidestepped by a man in his mid-fifties with a sensible mustache and lavender scrubs.
“Someone told me that Spider-Man was shot,” he said in a posh British accent, his eyes finding the young man on the bed and then his colleagues. “This is him then?” He shook his head at the poor wretch in the bed, as anonymous as any drug addict to move through the emergency department. “Surgery is being prepped as we speak.”
“He’s hypovolemic and tachycardic, came in at fourteen-hundred hours, single gunshot wound to the right hemithorax, chest tube placed. We have ten minutes,” she reported to the surgeon.
“Let’s go then,” he commanded, and transport protocols were underway a moment later.
Stepping out into the noise and the chaos of the main emergency department made the ripple in her vision crescendo sharply, and a wave of vertigo slammed into her body. She met Meeker’s eye as they wheeled their patient into the waiting elevator but found her feet heavy as lead weights as soon as she stepped into the corridor.
“You're not coming up?” Meeker asked from the elevator door.
“Don’t worry! You have…” she muttered, with a firm shake of her head, “you have time!”
The gleaming chrome doors of the patient transport elevator reflected the emergency department's lights, and the echoing sounds of triage around her melted into an electric cacophony of pain. Marian winced; she felt like she had been drugged, like that one weekend in California in 2018. She was in no shape to be treating patients.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” an elderly nurse asked her as she shielded her vision.
“Migraine!” she confessed. She accepted the cup of water that was offered and let herself be fussed over while she tried to figure out what she had felt back in the trauma bay.
If she was one to believe in superstition or magic—which, in these strange days of wizards and heroes, was most people—then she would say that what she had felt was a spirit. Of course, spirits do not exist, so she must attribute it to either her patient’s body, or her own, or to some other, undiscovered source. She looked across the ward, searching for someone, some source of whatever power had so overwhelmed her senses.
Her eyes landed on Frank Castle; he was deep in conversation with Agent Cleary.