Die a Hero

My Hero: The Villain

I stumbled down the alley, looking behind me every time I heard a sound, paranoid that my attackers had followed me. My wounds stung, and my suit was ripped and torn all up and down the torso and legs. Sadistic bastards. Another spasm ran through my body, an electric jolt left over from Sparks running enough electricity through me to turn the average person to barbecue. I’m honestly not even sure how I managed to survive it. A drop of blood hit the ground and I cursed. I had been trying not to leave any kind of trail that could be followed, and had somehow done a semi-decent job so far, but every drop of blood felt like another nail in my coffin. Almost there, I think.
I needed somewhere safe to hide out and heal up. I couldn’t go back to HQ, Sparks might be there waiting to finish me off. Besides, there’s not much they could do there that he couldn’t do. As much as I hated the idea, that flamboyant egotist was the only one I could trust not to kill me right now. I sniffed the air, his bizarre scent getting stronger the more I kept going until, finally, I arrived at a door and knocked.
I didn’t even have time to process the face of the person who opened the door before it was abruptly shut again in my face. There was some muffled and somewhat frantic-sounding shuffling on the other side of the door before he called out in a gruff voice, “how did you find me?” I didn’t have the energy to respond and just collapsed against the door with a not insignificant thud. The edges of my vision began to darken as my knees buckled beneath me. I barely registered the door opening a bit before my world faded to black.
Cold, so cold. When I came to, Frostbite was bent over me, both surgical and villain mask on, wearing what appeared to be latex gloves, and expertly stitching up. This came as a bit of a surprise, I assumed that he had some sort of surgical knowledge, or at the very least knew someone who did, from all the times his skin had been slashed through and he came back as good as new, but I never expected him to have a professional level of expertise. As my senses returned I realized in alarm that I couldn’t move. I panicked and strained as hard as I could, but my body just wouldn’t budge. I felt a soft tingling all over the surface of my skin, and when I looked down I realized that the wounds he hadn’t somehow managed to stitch up already were frozen shut. I still hated the fact that I couldn’t move, but was suddenly grateful for the numbing effect that came with the annoying handicap.
“What are you doing here?” Frostbite asked, not looking up from his stitchwork.
“Hopefully not dying,” I replied through gritted teeth
“I won’t make any guarantees,” he responded calmly, and then, “does anyone else know you’re here?”
“No, I disabled the tracker in my suit last night, and I assume you just destroyed the thing all together,” I said mechanically, before realizing that I was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants that were, regretfully, not mine. I suddenly felt very embarrassed.
This must have shown, because the next words out of his mouth were, “Don’t worry, I didn’t look more than I had to, and the underwear are your standard hospital emergency pair.”
Hospital? I looked to the side and noticed a tray of different medical implements, most of which probably had functions beyond what I would use them for. “Did you rob a hospital?” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
“Why? would that bother you?”
“A little bit, yeah,”
He smirked before replying, “Nah, they’re my tools. I will be charging you for my services when this is all done, by the way.”
“Why do you have medical tools?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Because I’m a doctor,” he replied flatly.
This response took me aback. A doctor? I always just assumed that he made his living knocking off museums, private collectors and the odd penthouse occupant, but to think he was an actual medical professional was unbelievable. Yet here he was, stitching up my wounds and taking care of me like your typical, everyday medical professional.
We sat there in silence for a while as he tied off the gash he was stitching up and defrosted the next one down. He had stitched up most of my wounds already, and only had the ones on the lower parts of my legs to finish. Though, the fact that I needed stitches at all had me concerned, but it was not entirely unexpected. Suddenly, I remembered that I couldn’t move and my panic returned.
“Why can’t I-”
“Why did you-”
We said in unison, before stopping to let the other continue.
“You first,” he insisted, so I proceeded with my question.
“Why can’t I move?”
He pointed to the bag of saline attached to my arm, “A little gift from a friend of mine. The saline has an added drug that prevents muscle movement. When you first got here you kept spasming, which made it nearly impossible to work on you, so I called in a favor and got some of that stuff. At first I tried injecting it, but that wore off too fast, so I figured a small but steady supply was the way to go. It wasn’t cheap, either. With the amount that I needed, I am going to have to do some things I really don’t want to, so I expect to be compensated fairly.” He paused for a few seconds, waiting for me to reply or ask another question, but when it became clear I wasn’t going to, he proceeded with his own questions. “Why did you come here? Why did you need to come here? I thought you were nearly invulnerable with your hyper healing or whatever. And even if there is something out there that can do this to you, why not go to HQ to get fixed up?”
I thought long and hard about how much I wanted to tell him before I finally spoke up. “Sparks,” I started, “it was Sparks.”
His face made an expression of mild surprise and he murmured, “that explains the spasms.”
I continued, “Not just Sparks, him and a team of very well trained hunters. I imagine if I wasn’t such a rare breed, I’d be dead.”
“Hunters?” he asked.
“Vampire hunters,” I explained, before trying to continue. I was cut off, though.
“Vampires? Come on be serious,” he interjected.
I glared at him, annoyed. “Believe me or don’t, it makes no difference to reality. Either way, my healing factor comes from my vampiric half, which means if someone uses a weapon or substance designed to hurt vampires on me, I’ll heal just as slow as a normal human, maybe just a bit faster with a shit ton of blood. I just hope they weren’t total pros and didn’t use any vamp poisons on me, that would suck ass.”
“Not saying I believe this whole vampire thing, but if that is what’s causing such a bizarre reaction in your blood, I’d say it’s not great news.”
“What kind of bizarre reaction?” I asked.
“Well, it seems there is some sort of substance attacking some blood cells at random and leaving others alone. Your body seems to try to be flushing this toxin out, but with varying results.”
“Fuck, the next week is going to suck.”
“Probably, but if I may ask, what do you expect to happen?” he asked, a hint of genuine concern in his voice. I brushed it off as just your standard doctor’s concern for their patient.
“I honestly don’t know. Without knowing the kind of poison I can’t know how my body will react. I spent some time with a friend seeing how I would react to different vamp poisons, the reactions ranging from bad fever for a few days to nearly dying and having to be given the antidote. There was also that time when I was younger my mom wanted to know the effect of vamp poison on me so she microdosed me with a rather weak one and I spent the next 3 days with a fever, unable to keep down anything with flavor. Of course, this was before I knew my mom’s history and before I’d ever had even a single drop of blood. I thought it was just the flu or something until she confessed what she’d done later”
“Your mom’s history?”
“Yeah, my mom’s a vampire. Dad was human, but he died a while ago. Actually died, not the died-and-came-back-to-life kind of died.”
He still looked like he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t admit it. “Where is your mom now?” he asked.
“Buried next to my dad,” I replied, “his death destroyed her, so she got her affairs in order and decided she wanted to join him. She’s not dead dead, she said she wanted to be there in case I ever really truly needed her, but she’s been dead to the world for a few decades now. Definitely not winning any ‘mom of the century’ awards anytime soon.”
“Wow, that must’ve happened when you were really young, I can’t imagine it was easy” he said forlornly
“I’m older than I look, the whole half-vampire thing.”
“Oh?” he responded, a look of amusement on his face, “and how old are you exactly, if I may ask?”
“Well, I was born in 1892, so that would mean I’ve been alive about 130 years.”
He remained speechless for a moment before cracking a grin and saying, “Well you don’t look a day over 25.”
I threw him a dirty look before responding, “Well, technically, I am around 25. I don’t know exactly how old I am because there was this one time when I was really young and a few times when I was a teenager that I didn’t age for a bit. Then there were a few times after I decided to stop aging that I had to go off blood for a little while, which caused me to age a little.”
“So, as long as you drink blood, you don’t age?” he asked.
“Basically,” I replied.
“Fascinating,” he exclaimed, before tying off the bit of stitching he was working on, getting up, taking off his gloves, and walking over to a small cooler he had in the corner. He opened it and took out a pouch filled with red liquid. I had seen those enough times to know instantly what it was: a blood bag. He walked back over to me and tried to hand it to me before remembering that I couldn’t move. “Oops, sorry,” he said, looking a tad embarrassed.
“I shouldn’t, anyways,” I replied.
“Why not? Won’t you start to age again without it?”
“Yeah, but I can take a few weeks of aging over the added agony from that bag of blood due to the vamp poisoning. The less vampiric and more human I am, the less of an effect the vamp poison is going to have on me.”
“That makes sense,” he said, before getting back up and putting the blood bag back in the cooler. My eyes followed wistfully as he did so. Even though I knew it could kill me right now, that bag did look really good. He returned to my side before defrosting, disinfecting and starting the stitching on my last wound, a large gash from the space next to my big toe to about 8-9 cm into my foot. That was by far my worst wound. I’d had to stop and bind the separated parts of my feet together just to be able to limp well enough to get here. I’d also had to shove the whole mess into a dirty plastic bag that I found so I didn’t leave an obvious blood trail. I was shocked that the whole thing wasn’t massively infected at this point, but it seems like, for all his faults, Frostbite was a damn good doctor.
“This wound is particularly nasty,” he commented, “if it weren’t for your healing factor, however ineffectual it may be at the moment, I’d definitely have to call in a colleague in podiatry. I’m still considering it, despite the risk.”
“Please don’t,” I replied, “worst case scenario, it heals a bit weirdly and I cut it open again with a regular knife so it can re-heal normally.”
I realized a second later that I had said that way too nonchalantly, as a look of horror crossed Frostbite’s face.
“Or I could come back to you and have you surgically open it back up with a normal blade so it can re-heal normally,” I quickly added, trying to seem less insane. It did not seem to work very well, but the look of horror in his eyes did seem to fade a little as he went back to focusing on stitching up my foot.
After about another hour he was done, all of my cuts and gashes were stitched up, covered in antibiotics, and bandaged, and I was clothed in a thin hospital gown. He switched my half-full bag of paralytic saline with a different one, which I guess had a lower concentration of the paralytic in it, because I began to be able to move, albeit with great difficulty. I was initially happy at the fact that some movement had returned to my body, and I even contemplated ripping out the paralytic all together so that I could have my full range of movement back, as he hadn’t thought of tying me up to prevent escape, but I quickly understood why. With the lessened amount of paralytics, the spasms returned, and all though they were minor, they still hurt. Less paralytics also meant less of the pain-numbing effect. Frostbite didn’t need to tie me up, I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Thank you,” I said after a long moment of silence, “you must have stayed up all night to be able to patch all my wounds up, and I’m supposed to be your enemy.”
“I don’t make it a habit of considering injured people who need my help my enemies, even if we were enemies in the past. Besides, I’m not nearly as impressive as you think I am. You were out for over a day while I worked on you, and, while that is a long time to go without sleep, I’ve gone for longer back when I was in medical school, and during my internship.”
“A day?!” I exclaimed incredulously.
“Yep,” he replied, “which reminds me, you must be starving.”
I did have to admit that my stomach was feeling rather empty. Almost as if on cue my stomach growled loudly. Frostbite raised an eyebrow and I said sheepishly, “I guess so.” He quickly left the room, then returned after a few minutes with a bowl of soup, some plain toast, and butter on a tray. 
“Before I feed you, are there any allergies I should know about? Garlic, perhaps?”
I glared at him then replied, “No, no food allergies at least.”
“Good, now how much butter would you like on your toast?” he asked in a coddling tone
“I can butter my own toast,” I snapped, and took the butter knife from him.
“Yes, you can, but it will be exhausting. It will just be easier for me to do it. If you truly insist on doing things yourself, I will take no part in feeding you,” he said, unfazed, and took the knife back from me. “Now, how much butter would you like on your toast?”
I sat back, scowled, and grumbled, “Just a thin layer.”
He buttered my toast quickly and put it back on the tray for me to eat, then sat back, crossed his arms, and stared at me intently. That annoyed me, but I picked up the toast, dipped it in my soup, and took a bite. After a few more bites of my toast and my soup I was utterly exhausted, and I set both the toast and my spoon down to rest a bit.
“If you don’t eat your food quickly it’s going to get cold,” he said after a little while, “would you like some help?”
I wanted to scowl at him again, but I didn’t have the energy, so I just solemnly nodded my head. He sat back up and fed me the rest of my soup and toast, then took the tray back to the kitchen. He returned with a box of juice, straw already inserted, and handed it to me, assuming I could do something as simple as drink a box of juice from a straw myself, then left the room. When he came back he had a needle with some sort of liquid in it, presumably a drug of some sort, and began injecting it into my IV bag.
“What is that?” I snapped.
“Calm down,” he replied, “it’s just a standard sedative to help you sleep. You don’t have any allergies to any sedatives, do you?”
“Not to your standard human sedatives, no.”
He looked at me questioningly for a little while before walking to the side of the bed, picking up the remote, and lowering the back of the bed slowly until I was in a lying position. He then put a pillow under my head and covered me with a blanket. I barely registered what he said as he turned off the lights and left the room. Something along the lines of, “call me if you need anything,” I think. I felt myself getting drowsier and drowsier, until finally I succumbed to the sweet peace of sleep.