He absolutely could not keep still.

His hands were shaking, his legs were shaking, his eyes were shaking. Every part of him ached to get up from his makeshift chair and perform the operation himself. No, he thought, I have to trust Doc with this.

But the more he told himself to trust Doc, the less he actually did, and the more he wanted to knock his hands away from the body on the table.

This wait was going to kill him.

At what felt like a hundred miles away, Doc stood with his fingers poking around in the neck of a body Ian had become accustomed to keeping constant contact with. It was so unsettling, to see her lying on the table as if dead, when that’s what he’d been trying to prevent for so long.

Ian sighed, tried and failed to relax, and put his head in his hands. A second later he picked it back up when it detected a muttered curse from Doc.

He had to fight every instinct in his body that told him to run straight to the table. Doc knew what he was doing. There was nothing to be afraid of.

A flash of silver caught Ian’s eye. It was on Doc’s fingers, on his shirt, on his face.

Instantly, he was on his feet and beside the table, all his careful self-control of earlier forgotten.

“What the hell did you do?!”
Doc mumbled in response, a shameful admission that he’d forgotten where to touch the soul and accidentally pulled too hard. A few of Wanda’s tiny limbs had been pulled off and were lazily dripping silvery blood.
“Well, don’t just stand there like an idiot!” Ian roared. “Get her out of there!”
“Ian, be rational. If I try to force her out, Melanie could get hurt.”
“I don’t give a damn about what happens to Melanie! Just get her out!” Somewhere in Ian’s peripheral vision, Jared leapt to his feet and adopted an expression almost identical to his, but he didn’t care.

The tension in the air was causing Wanda to shake, but no one seemed to notice until a horrible slicing sound echoed through the whole room.

Ian didn’t need to look. He knew. So did Doc. So did Jared.

He turned toward the huge human-shaped blur that was heading straight for him and put his arms up defensively.

The last thing he remembered was a crazed scream of “You got what you wanted!” before he was struck on the side of the head, and he saw nothing but black.

Nothing but black and silver.