clan akkaba base // two hours ago
A grunt leaves Pietro’s mouth as knuckles meet his center, his own turning white as he grips the other man’s shirt at his shoulders and tosses him at the wall. There’s too many of them, and it’s been awhile since Pietro has been worried about something as trivial as odds. But his eyes find Lorna every second he gets the chance to spare a glance around the room they’ve been backed into. She’s holding her own, just as he’d expect her to, but he can feel her exhaustion from here. She never should have followed him, into the belly of the beast. But what was he supposed to do? Turn her away in front of the entirety of the Clan? They would have known he was a mole right away.
And that’s what family did to him, didn’t it? But it also made him deadly. Circling his next attacker, Pietro grips him around the neck from behind and crushes his throat with a force he knows he shouldn’t be capable of exerting. All that experimentation had paid off in the end, but not in the way the scientists had intended. Fingers slick with blood, he moves smoothly across the room to hook them in the eyes of the mutant advancing on Lorna. She’s sweating, her dark hair plastered to her forehead but she’s furious, and he knows it’s keeping her alive. But a brief once over tells him what he fears, she’s been injured.
She’ll scar, she’ll look in the mirror and see the men she’s killed, she’ll become you.
He was reckless. He should have let those filthy men say what they wanted, what did it matter anyway? He’d gotten them into this mess with his temper, his stupid temper that left him scarred and Wanda in tears time and time again. Is that how it would proceed with Lorna then? Would he care for her helplessly more and more every day, and only succeed in creating a mess for her to weep over? It’s that thought that stops him, just in front of her, hands reaching out to lift her into his arms. To take them far from this place. It’s that hesitation that gifts their attackers with an opening, and they take it.
Pietro’s yell is guttural, and instead of holding his sister he’s holding the pipe they’ve shoved through his body just below his collarbone. As he pulls it, they kick the back of his knees til he’s kneeling before her. He stares into her eyes, hard and determined. “You’re okay,” he tells her, and there should be no doubt in her mind that he means it. “You’re okay.” He can feel the blood gushing from the wound as he pulls the pipe, hot and soaking the front of his shirt. It’s a familiar feeling, and he doesn’t try to place it because when he does a static fills his mind that is an unwelcome distraction.
Lorna. He thinks. Max. He pulls it free. Wanda.
Tossing the blood soaked pipe at Lorna, he lets himself be hauled up by the Clan Akkaba members with a grin on his lips. “Sorry to ruin your fun,” he chuckles, his arms being wrenched behind his back. “But I’ve got a girl to get home to.” His chuckles turn into a full blown laugh, half delirious with blood loss. “And you’ve just given Magneto’s daughter a metal pipe.”