This is a work of Fan-Fiction written for everyone for free and available to be read by everyone for free. No one is making any money off of this except Marvel Comics Inc. So if you want to sue somebody and expect to get any money from the case, I suggest you sue Marvel, not me. ;)

Alright… Disturbing Imagery here, folks, with Capital Letters and Everything.

I wouldn’t rate this story anything less than a PG-13, so just to be safe, let’s make it an R.

Characters’ Thoughts are described *This way *.

If I ever write in a Telepath, when they talk in someone’s head it will look ~` Like this `~.

I’m on a role here. ;) This would be the forth installment in my ‘Sins’ series. Hope everyone reads and enjoys and all. I also hope this isn’t the story that will be denied by any and every site owner who doesn’t want any violent or disturbing stories associated with their site. Me, I fancy realism, and in the lives of the superhero crime fighting type, violence and such is, like, just something that would happen. As not to say that I’m interested exclusively in writing or reading that type of Fan-Fiction. I’m simply saying that such is the theme of this story in particular.

And So On With The Show.

By SylvrGypsy

"So, Simon filled you in then, did he?"

Lorna Dane rolled her eyes without being too obvious about it. Crystal huffed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Captain America cleared his throat to break the silence.

"I think he was a little distracted, Hank."

"Fine then, since I have the most recent update on Pietro’s condition, allow me."

"If you’re going to talk to Crystal for a while, Dr. Pym, I’m going to go in and see Pietro again. Excuse me." Lorna slipped between the three Avengers bundled in the hall, and quietly cracked opened the infirmary room door, just wide enough to allow herself in.

Crystal tried to sneak a peek inside the room, but it was closed behind the other woman too soon.

"In that case, I’ll go ahead in now as well. There’s something I’d like to ask Pietro about."

Cap got a reproving look from Dr. Pym. "Ah, that is, if he feels up to it, of course."

Hank removed his reading glasses and pointed one end cautiously at the other man.

"Don’t push him, Cap. We don’t know all he’s been through yet. He might not be up to anything at all right now."

"Right. Understood."

Captain America turned and placed his gloved hand on the doorknob, but didn’t turn it. Over his shoulder, thoughtfully, he said- "Crystal, if you’d like, I’ll try to convince Wanda to come out of there for a while when Lorna and I leave, so you and Pietro can have some privacy."

Crystal just nodded in response, and although Cap had his back to her, somehow he understood her answer. He went in, leaving Hank and Crystal alone in the hall.

"Simon said a special surgeon came…" Crystal’s voice wasn’t as bright as Hank remembered. She sounded numb; if that even was a tone a voice could possibly assume.

"Yes, Doctor Curtis. When Lorna brought Pietro here-"

"Lorna brought Pietro here?"

"Yes. Is that…so strange? They were working together in Genosha-"

"Yes, I know they were working together in Genosha, and I know they were in X-Factor together, and I know she’s here as our ally."

Hank’s expression made Crystal feel like she was being obnoxious. And maybe she was. But for the second time since she arrived, someone was speaking to her like she didn’t even know Pietro anymore.

Crystal forced herself to calm down. It wasn’t Hank she was mad at, after all…

"Alright, Hank. She brought Pietro here. And then what?"

"And when I examined his injuries, I thought we needed someone with more medical experience, by way of specific surgical procedures. So Iron Man suggested Doctor Curtis, and-"

"Wait! Pietro was already injured?"

Hank gave Crystal a decidedly strange look. "He was injured in Genosha, and Lorna brought him here. I thought we’d already established that."

"No. No, we didn’t."

"Well, that’s how it happened. And Doctor Curtis-"

"Wait! What happened to Pietro in Genosha?"

Hank’s unreadable expression turned into very clear annoyance. Crystal offhandedly took notice that she had indeed interrupted him, more than once. But she needed the facts in straight order, and as she’d learned from past experience, sometimes when Hank got to talking things didn’t always come out that way.

"Actually, Lorna would be better off telling you about that end of it. Being as how I wasn’t there. I can say, though, that conditions in Genosha have been getting bad again. Civil War is the order of the day, last I heard."

"I know that. So exactly what can you tell me, Hank, that I don’t already know?" At the moment, even Crystal herself couldn’t quite understand why she was acting the way she was. Hank looked offended by her remark, but Crystal stuck by her question, never wavering for a moment that she didn’t expect an exact answer.

"I can tell you about his present physical condition. And I can tell you that if you walk in there with the same attitude you have now, Wanda won’t be too thrilled to have your company."

His words seemed to have a double meaning that she couldn’t make sense of.

"Well," Crystal said uncertainly, "I’m not here to be in Wanda’s company."

"I realize that. But I don’t have to tell you that if you aggravate Wanda, it’ll only upset Pietro. And he’s the only thing I have a concern for right now."

Hank ran a hand through his blonde hair and sighed. Rubbing sleep-deprived eyes from behind his glasses, he half-mumbled; "I’ve already got Cap in there playing double-jeopardy with him as we speak…"

"Hank...?"

"It’s nothing. Listen, you know that thanks to the nature of Pietro’s mutation, his system is hyper-resistive to drugs of any sort, right?"

Crystal nodded.

"Well, for the operation, we had to use more anesthetics than we would have preferred to keep him out during the entire procedure. If he wakes up right now, to the point of being coherent, I would quite frankly be surprised. But still, assuming he does, when you go in to see him try not to let on that you’re too worried about him. We should try to convince him that he’s in good shape, so he’ll feel safe from the beginning. Understand? If he believes that we think he’s okay, he’ll believe it too. And that’ll only help the healing process."

Crystal’s nod began going up and down, but ended making a circle in the air.

"But…isn’t he okay? Janet and Simon said that he was, and-"

"Well, at this point, he’s in stable condition, and we’re not worried about him dying on us anymore."

Crystal’s heart jumped at that last word. He just said without saying that at some point in time, they had expected he might die. She swallowed back her unease and listened carefully to every word.

"But that doesn’t necessarily put him in the ‘okay’ category, either. At least not from a medical stand point. See, when he first came in he was suffering from the most severe case of shock I’ve ever seen. He’d been exposed to near-freezing temperatures with considerable loss of blood, and like Ms. Dane pointed out earlier, his powers were spent, which was inhibiting his body’s ability to recuperate as fast as it normally would."

Hank’s expression turned thoughtful.

"Actually, even all that wouldn’t have been quite such a problem if he’d just been treated sooner, but as I understand it even Lorna got to him late, and what she was able to do for him herself by way of medical treatment was trivial. By no fault of her own, of course. She simply wasn’t prepared. She had no bandages, no sedatives, no means to warm him… So when they got here, he had already deteriorated pretty badly. Thankfully, Lorna called us via Pietro’s Avengers I.D card, told us that she was on her way, and what to expect."

Crystal’s face was a color Hank couldn’t remember it being a moment ago.

"Do you…want to sit down?"

She blinked rapidly and shook her head.

"No, no. I’m fine. Go on, please."

He felt uncomfortable, but he decided to continue. Janet always said he was insensitive to these sorts of things. He was certain now that he wouldn’t know how much information Crystal wanted or needed to know, and therefore wouldn’t know what to say and not to say, or when to stop saying it.

"Alright, where was I? Ah, yes. So he was suffering from heart failure among other things-"

"What?" Crystal said, aghast. "Heart failure?"

Hank put his hand up to stop Crystal from talking. When he spoke again his tone was similar to the one people use when explaining things to very small children.

"He was badly injured, which caused circulatory shock. His heart sped up to circulate blood faster in order to compensate for the bleeding and shock caused by his injuries. Heart failure occurred because his body was loosing blood faster than it could replenish it, which brought on progressive shock. Any questions?"

"And because his powers were exhausted, his body wasn’t reproducing blood as fast as it normally would have…"

"Exactly." Hank looked satisfied.

Crystal thought for a moment. "Why was he exhausted? I mean, how? His powers won’t let him get tired."

"Well, his body’s metabolism is quite different than ours, true. But he can and does get tired. He just has far more energy and needs much less rest than you or I, for example."

"That doesn’t answer my question, Hank."

"…Right. Yes, he was in a fight, as Lorna said earlier. Didn’t you hear?"

"Hank, I just got here…" Now it was Crystal’s turn to be annoyed.

"Right, right, of course. Well, I didn’t hear the whole story either, as I was busy with Dr. Curtis and Tony in the O.R while she was-"

"Hank! For the love of Agon, please just tell me what you know!"

Hank looked perplexed. But then, he never could understand why people sometimes didn’t want to listen to him talk.

"He was sabotaged. They were prepared for him, prepared to deal with his particular powers and abilities. Even at that, they beat him, just barely, by sheer force of numbers alone, so Lorna said."

Crystal heard no small trace of pride in that last remark.

"Who, Hank? Who were they?"

"One or other of the parties involved in the war that’s ravaging Genosha right now, but I’m not sure which side was responsible. As I heard from Lorna, they were out to get Pietro in order to…send a message to Magneto."

Crystal’s delicate hands clenched into fists at her sides. Hank was amazed that he could actually hear her teeth grind.

"What kind of a ‘message’?"

"They wanted Magneto to ’pay for his sins’ committed against the Genoshan people. That was the message they intended Pietro’s dead body to deliver." Hanks own expression began to twist into anger. "They nearly succeeded…"

"Damn him..." Crystal turned away from Hank to conceal her rage. It wasn’t proper for a lady of the throne to be prone to such outrage. But that couldn’t help her now.

"Damn him!"

Hank put a hand lightly on her shoulder. "Crys, you can’t blame this on Pietro, that’s not being fair…His reasons for being there were noble, even if-"

Crystal spun around so fast it made him flinch. "Sweet Agon, no! I don’t blame Pietro, I blame his damned father; I blame Magneto!" She quieted her voice before Hank could instruct her to do the same.

"I…want to see him now, Hank. Can’t anything else you want to tell me just wait until later?"

"Actually, no. Don’t touch him."

Crystal looked absolutely indignant, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t acting. Explaining, he said- "He has broken ribs, a fractured collar bone, a mild concussion, severe bruising and…" Hank started reading from the medical transcripts on his clipboard, and never bothered to look back up- "and be especially sure not to move his wrists."

‘Awkward’ would have been an understatement to describe the silence that followed.

"Why…?"

Henry Pym swallowed hard, but the lump in his throat wasn’t going anywhere.

"Because they crucified him, Crystal. We have the bleeding tentatively under control right now, but the slightest tug on those stitches could be a real problem. We can’t risk him loosing any more blood and possibly going into shock again, so…"

He felt terrible. *There are probably a million better ways I could have- should have told her. Janet, where are you...?*

Hank’s mind raced; trying to figure out something to say that would make her feel better, even if only a little better. But nothing came to mind. Besides ‘just kidding’, but in the long run, that probably wouldn’t do much good at all.

He was gratefully distracted from beating up on himself when Crystal, whom he noticed had started to wobble, suddenly toppled over.

"Whoa, there! I gotcha…I’ve got you…"

A loud clang sounded when his clipboard hit the bare hardwood floor, but he didn’t pay it any attention. Crystal’s face was devoid of all color, save for an unhealthy shade of gray. Her body was mostly limb in his arms, but she already seemed to be coming around again.

"Just relax, Crystal. I’ve got you. Relax."

She was struggling to get out of his support as soon as she was regaining consciousness. Hank tried awfully hard not to be insulted.

"Let go."

"Crys-"

"Let me go!"

"Crystal!" Hank spun her around to face him, away from the infirmary room door that she made a dash to open. He held onto her arms just hard enough to let her know she wasn’t going anywhere until he let her.

"Listen to me!" He hissed- "You’re not going in there if you’re going to do more harm than good. So just take a minute to calm down."

Crystal almost laughed, but didn’t. If she wanted to get her way, she decided it was better to let Hank believe he was in control. Which, unbeknownst to Crystal, he was.

"Fine, I shall take a moment." Not believing her, he didn’t let go. "Fine, I said." Reluctantly, he let her out of his grasp.

There was a pause that seemed to last for hours. Crystal turned away from him again, and just stared blankly at the opposite wall.

Finally, she asked softly- "He’ll recover?"

Clearing his throat, and retrieving his clipboard from where he dropped it, he said- "Yes. Well, physically anyway…"

She looked at him questioningly.

"In cases of secondary shock accompanied by loss of blood as severe as his was, there’s always a chance of brain damage. Although, I’ve been running various tests and bio scans, and I haven’t found any unrepairable tissue damage so far."

"He’ll need more surgery, then?"

"No, not necessarily. His body should be able to heal itself at this point without the need for more surgery. However, there’s also the issue of psychological damage. I’m sure what he went through won’t be easy to…get over, so to speak."

"No…" Crystal’s face was still ashen; it made Hank worry.

"How…did they do it?" Her voice was trembling.

"An ambush. I’m sure Lorna would-"

"No, I mean…" It sounded like she may have kept talking, but her voice was so weak, he couldn’t make out the words. Just judging by her repulsed expression, he was fairly certain he understood what she was asking.

"Through the wrists, between the Radius and Ulna bones. I wish I could say that they missed any veins or arteries, but they didn’t get them all, so I suppose we should be thankful for small favors. A lot of damage suffered to the tendons, though. Fine motor control of his hands and fingers will probably take months of physical therapy to regain."

"Oh, Pietro, my darling…" Her voice was little more than a whisper, but he could still hear her pain like a high pitched squeal.

"It could have been worse, Crystal. Much worse."

"But it shouldn’t have been at all, Hank!" Without thinking she threw herself into his arms, and without thinking he returned her embrace. "It just shouldn’t have been at all." A long moment passed and neither said a word. There were no tears, no empty reassurances; just a shared sympathy, a mutual remorse.

Crystal broke the connection and looked pleadingly into his eyes.

"I need to see my husband now. Please, may I go in?"

Hank could see no more aggression in her features. She was out of ‘fight’, he decided, out of anger. Now she just wanted to help, to heal. *Probably hope for those two after all.* Hank thought. *I’ll have to remember to remind Janet later that I ‘told her so’.*

"Sure, Crys. I just changed his dressings, but I need to watch his monitors when he comes out of anesthesia. I’ll come in with you."

He opened the door and gestured for her to go in first. On another day, she would have said ‘thank you’, as would be proper behavior for a princess. On another day, she wouldn’t be holding her breath as she prepared to see her husband for the first time in weeks.

Or maybe she would be.