Post by Spider-Man Beyond on Aug 28, 2007 18:07:32 GMT -5
Truth & Justice I #9
Written by JC Roberts (Calamityjamie)
Edited by Daniel Dyer (Spider-Man Beyond)
He woke up coughing. His throat felt like sandpaper and jolts of fire were running down the length of his right leg. Martha had not lied about it still being there. Bruce was no longer sure he was glad of that.
Lian was sitting in the chair. Her eyes flicked up from a martial arts magazine. “Awake?” she asked.
He nodded. He noticed with distress the web of IV lines suspended around the bed and was uncomfortably aware of the presence of a Foley catheter. “Water?”
Martha had apparently rustled up a plastic straw. Bruce found himself unable to hold the glass himself. He managed a few sips, then looked past Lian towards the open bedroom door.
“She’s getting some sleep in my room,” said Lian astutely. She studied him for a few moments, before adding, “After the bloodiest, most grueling week of her entire life.”
Bruce did not know what to say. He shut his eyes.
“You need her?” asked Lian, who was clearly building up to something Bruce was sure he would not enjoy.
He mumbled, “I’m fine.”
“Does your leg hurt?” Lian asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” she said brightly. “Means your nerves are working.”
Bruce had the feeling she was just glad he was in pain. He had noticed a hospital-issue pain control pump near her chair, but Lian made no attempt to adjust it.
“Want me to catch you up?” she asked.
He did not answer. He was beginning to feel nauseated, not only from the thundering pain in his leg, but from anticipation of an account of the past previous days he wasn’t ready to hear.
Lian’s description of the events following his disastrous battle with Fray was brutally vivid. His leg, she informed him, had looked “like one of those spiral turkeys – the boneless ones” or maybe just “like one of those big drumsticks at Disney World, after someone’s thrown them on the ground and the pigeons have ripped them up.” She abandoned a third comparison when Bruce threatened to throw up.
Martha and some amputation expert had spent six grueling hours sewing up the holes in Bruce’s blood vessels and re-attaching the muscles and ligaments, Lian continued. She herself had acted as a surgical assistant, holding retractors and passing instruments to the absorbed doctors as they struggled to make his leg whole again.
Afterwards, Martha thanked the surgeon profusely. Then she shocked both Lian and Superman by making a thinly veiled threat to have Meera Buhpathi monitor the man’s thoughts and wipe his memory clean if he even thought of sharing his experience with anyone, even his wife.
“I don’t think Meera can do that – the memory thing,” said Lian. “But Martha that rude? How stressed out was she?”
Bruce himself found this information surprising – but he was not sorry Martha had made the threat. If the underworld of Gotham found out he was injured, a criminal free-for-all could turn one nightmarish week into months of terror.
Lian concluded her report with the news that after Superman had helped move Bruce into Martha’s bed and had flown the frazzled surgeon home, Martha had spent twenty minutes in the bathroom vomiting, a new and utterly miserable experience for her.
“Clark was here?” Bruce asked, desperately hoping to distract Lian from any evidence on his face that he had never felt more wretched in his life – a sentiment that had nothing to do with his screaming leg.
“Yeah, I think he was puking, too,” said Lian. She looked at her watch. “OK. I can give you more morphine, now.” She reached over to the infusion pump and punched in a few numbers. Then she turned back to Bruce with a ferocious look.
“I told you all this,” she said fiercely, “so you would stop hurting my friend. She’d done nothing but try to help you. This time she almost killed herself doing it.”
Bruce opened his mouth, but he lost his reply somewhere in the rush of morphine.
“I know what you’re doing,” Lian added. “Next time, just punch her on the arm and tell her she has cooties. It’s much more mature and nowhere near as mean.”
As he started spinning into unconsciousness, Bruce realized what Lian was trying to say. He opened his mouth to deny her absolutely absurd…
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