Flea

Chapter Sixty Four (Part Two)

Hawks shoved down on Recovery Girl's abdomen with both hands, and water streamed from her still motionless lips. The man paused, checking her chest for movement, then repeated. Then repeated. Then repeated. The evacuated water quickly formed a pool around her head, and when he noticed she was ventilating again Hawks found he'd stopped breathing himself.

Thank god. Performing CPR on the little shit was pushing the boundaries of what he was willing to do to keep her alive.

Joking, jeez. He'd once needed to rip out not one but two nipple rings from a civilian to defibrillate them in front of fans that had breached police lines. This was preferable. Unless she was hiding a few piercings of her own.

Recovery Girl's pulse was incredibly faint, but he'd worry about that later. He easily sawed through fish twine binding her ankles together, then removed her shoes and socks. The girl's clothing had become transparent and clung to what looked like a bodysuit underneath. The dress was likely designer, but boring as hell, so Hawks felt no qualms about ripping open the front and sending buttons scuttling across the floor of the kitchen. He pulled her out of the sopping sleeves and gathered it neatly around her, tipped the girl on her front still between his legs so he could get the fabric loose, and threw the wet pile of cotton across the room.

Hawks took off his own jacket and prepared it over her for modesty, then began unzipping the back of her drenched body suit, careful to avoid gashes on her neck, to expose a pale back. He paused. Felt the slimy inside of the material (why the fuck was it slimy?), and couldn't help but groan to himself in disgust mixed with relief. The winged hero efficiently zipped it back up, too relieved he wouldn't need to completely strip her naked to be properly angry.

"That was a multi-million dollar design you stole," he smiled, taking into account the small modifications to a white suit otherwise identical to his, except for slime, which was already steaming as it worked to bring the nerd's body back to a liveable temperature. Slow enough that it wouldn't burn her, he assumed, since his own suit had that setting.

It was nearly a relief to offload his fur jacket onto her, because ignoring the freezers that kitchen was fucking boiling.

Finally, Hawks swung his leg off her and pulled Recovery Girl, ironically, into the recovery position. He accepted two bowls of warm water from flurrying feathers, and lowered her purple feet into them. She was so small, even swaddled in the bulky jacket, that he could easily pull her against himself to share body heat while maintaining open airways. Down feathers kept clean from air pollution arranged themselves around her to maximise warmth and covered wounds on her neck and wrists.

Once settled in that position, his bare back cushioned by dirtier down against a wall, the hero finally had time to think. Hawks looked down at the teenager nestled against his chest and finally allowed himself to let out a stream of expletives.

"Why couldn't you just walk back to the train station? I organised protection along that route," he asked her, voice cracking. When his agency's screening systems had picked up social media posts claiming Recovery Girl was at Fukuoka opera house, he hadn't believed them. Not until they claimed she was in the seat reserved for him, which was too oddly specific, and he needed to pause on the way out of the agency door to freedom. The winged hero had wanted to give her privacy, against all reasonable arguments, which had been many. The length of time it took convincing his sidekick Robin (yes, he had a sidekick called Robin. Ha ha.) not to follow Recovery Girl from the ballet was the reason he'd been late to his date. Look how that turned out.

Now he needed to make an impossible decision, based on such little information Hawks felt like banging his head back into the wall.

He really didn't want to make the call.