Too Late

The first thing Tony noticed was how cold the room was. Even in his suit, he could feel the chill in the air. Colder even than when he floated in the abyss of space briefly before being caught in a welcome pair of arms.

Arms that were now strapped to a metal operating table, palms turned up, veins left vulnerable and exposed, like the rest of the man appeared.

Bruce Banner could not die. Not with the Hulk raging in his bloodstream like an irradiated body guard. If the doctor’s heart stopped beating, the Hulk restarted it with frightening efficiency.

But Bruce wasn't anything close to a shade of green. If anything, he was blue. Everything except his eyes. His usually warm, brown gaze was staring dead at the ceiling under a dry sheet of gray.

“No, no, no. Bruce, don't do this,” Tony warned violently, retracting his gloves to start compressions on the doctor’s cold, still chest. He grunted as he pressed, hard enough that he would have worried about breaking ribs had they not already looked broken.

“Jarvis, tell Cap to get the stretcher in here, and to bring Clint.”

“Very well, sir,” the AI replied, but Tony barely heard him over the blood rushing in his ears.

“Damn it, Banner, breathe!” Tony growled before leaning over to blow air into Bruce’s lungs.

“Stark! Where are you?” A voice from the hall called out, just as Tony was switching back to compressions.

“In here. Hurry!”

Come on, Bruce.

Steve ran towards the sound of Tony’s voice, dragging the wheeled stretcher behind him. Clint had to push hard to keep up with the super soldier, running blindly after him until he almost ran him over when he stopped dead in a doorway.

“Stark! How is….. Oh no…”

The billionaire didn't even seem to register the Captain’s words. He was frantically alternating between trying to pump Banner’s heart and trying to fill his lungs. But the doctor’s eyes remained fixated on a spot high above them, empty and lifeless as the rest of him. His mouth was hanging open, jaw limp as though he had been screaming when the light left his eyes.

The room reeked of sterility, like a hospital. But the blood splattered around the floor and the walls provided a stark contrast to the clean scent. Banner’s table stood in the middle of the room, opposite a large viewing window embedded in the wall.

“Tony….” Steve started, only to be cut off by a glare from the inventor.

“No!” he snapped with such ferocity, Clint wouldn't have been surprised to see green in his eyes.

“Cap,” Natasha called from over the com.

“Here,” Steve replied, unable to tear his eyes away from the body Stark was working over, “We were too late.” His voice was so quiet that Clint couldn't hear his words, just read the despair in his eyes.

“What?” came the disbelieving response from the com in Steve’s ear, followed by Tony’s snarl.

“Like hell we were. Am I the only one who is going to do anything here? Get him on that stretcher, we have to get him to SHIELD!”

Clint and Steve exchanged a knowing look before wordlessly scooping up their fallen friend and depositing him as gently as possible on the stretcher. Up close, he looked worse. Tear tracks were still visible on the blood-stained skin of his face, jaw locked and body stiff.

They were too late by a couple of days at the most, despite three months of tearing the country apart in their search.

Tony was upon him again immediately, resuming compressions on that unyielding, now caved in chest. But Steve did nothing to stop him, Bruce was beyond the concern of a few broken ribs. If Tony noticed how cold, dry,  and chapped the physicist’s unmoving lips were, he didn't say. Instead, he seamlessly moved from chest to mouth, even as the stretcher was lifted into the quinjet and they set off towards the helicarrier.

No one tried to talk sense into Stark again. He seemed to hear nothing but the eternal silence of Bruce’s heart, and the empty space where his breaths should have been.

It took two medics to tear Tony off of Bruce in the medbay, and another to press a gentle finger to the physicist’s throat and pronounce him dead. The words seemed to be what finally broke the billionaire. He didn’t scream, or collapse, or even sob. He simply staggered back into a chair, and lowered himself like a man approaching the gallows. His hands wound through his hair as he held his head, staring at the steel floor with shining, wide eyes empty of all their usual mirth. It was, surprisingly, Clint who broke. He leaned over the doctor’s corpse, pulling him into a loose embrace and cradling the man’s head in his calloused fingers, eyes clenched as he buried his head into the cold skin of Bruce’s shoulder. The archer’s sobs shattered the tentative silence of the medbay. Wordlessly, the medical staff left, leaving the team to mourn their soft-spoken friend in peace.

For a while, no one spoke. Natasha leaned against the wall, eyes glued to Bruce’s wrist resting on top of the white sheet covering his lower body, where deep bruises decorated his inner wrists where he had strained against the cuffs. Subconsciously, she rubbed her own wrists, as if remembering the feel of restraints removed long ago. Tony held vigil over his spot on the floor, and didn’t look up when Steve stepped into his line of sight.

“Someone needs to tell Thor,” Natasha spoke up from her corner, eyes landing on Tony.

“Fuck that. If he wanted to know, he should have helped us search, and even better, helped us get him back. Where was he all these months?” Clint snapped, looking up from Bruce’s shoulder to glare at no one in particular.

“He was on Asgard visiting his family, and then he was far from here, following my orders to stay with his friends. I didn’t tell him anything, purposely. An alien storming a US military facility would have been seen as an act of war. The last thing he needs is to be dragged into intergalactic politics,” Steve replied evenly, eyes still on Tony. The man didn’t even seem to register the discussion.

“Fuck your orders. It was fucking politics that kept us from getting to Bruce in the first place. You wouldn’t just let us get it out of Ross, it’d cause ‘too much of a scene’. If we had, we might have…. We could have…” The archer’s voice broke, and he convulsed once more into sobs. Natasha left her place on the wall to lay a gentle hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off. 

“It’s not our fault, Clint. We didn’t know,” she said softly, moving to stand beside him. Steve pretended not to notice how she raised her other hand to rest it over the doctor’s.

“Of course it’s not your fault,” a rough voice drawled from behind Steve, “It’s mine.”

Tony raised his eyes to meet Steve’s now, and the level of grief and guilt in them caused the soldier to step back slightly.

“Tony…” Natasha started, only to be cut off by the engineer’s hand slashing the air in front of him.

“He was in my home when they took him. Fuck, I didn’t even listen when he said he needed to run. I convinced him to stay, told him he would be safe…. I should have set up more precautions. I should have known he wouldn’t hulk out to protect himself, not in such a crowded city. I should have listened.”

“There are things all of us could have done, but none of that will make a difference now, and it might not even have made a difference then. Ross has been after him for years, he wasn’t about to give up just because Banner made a few new friends. He would have fought us to get to him, and how would Bruce have felt? How would Bruce feel now, knowing how much we are tearing ourselves apart for this? No, we owe it to him to try and forgive ourselves, as he would have if he were standing here,” Steve said, his Captain America voice peeking through the cracks of his heavy words.

“But he’s not here, Rogers, and someone has to answer for it,” Clint hissed. Steve sighed, shaking his head. They couldn’t be reasoned with right now, but he could almost hear the doctor in his head, pleading with them not to blame themselves, because he was the one who went willingly, knowing the consequences. He made his choice, and there was nothing his team mates could have done. Ross would have found him again, and again. And the last thing Bruce had ever wanted was for someone to get hurt defending him.

In his rational mind, Steve knew this. Knew it wasn’t their fault, knew what the doctor would have wanted. But looking at the lifeless body on the table, wasted away, beaten, surgery scars and burns visible beneath the bright lights, it wasn’t so easy to rationalize away the guilt eating at him. While he had been enjoying lunches with the President in an attempt to bring the man to their side, Bruce had been tortured, experimented on, starved, and forgotten by everyone but his few friends. No one had wanted to help. Ross had won the right to detain Banner legally, and no one was going to go through the political shitstorm it would take to revoke that right. Not even Tony’s bribes had been able to buy the man’s location, or freedom.

Steve was not new to loss. One didn’t suddenly jump forward more than half a century and not have anyone to mourn. But even his experience with grief didn’t make this loss any easier. Of all the team members he had prepared his goodbyes for, Bruce was not one of them. The man was invincible, it had seemed. The Hulk protected him, and they had all believed he would have outlasted the other Avengers by decades. Not even Coulson or Pietro’s death had affected him quite so much. Coulson was an agent, he knew the risks, and they had barely had time to know the boy called Quicksilver before his untimely end. But Bruce… Bruce they had known for over a year now. They had shared meals with him, carried him to his bed after he collapsed on the battlefield when the Hulk receded, had watched him change from a flighty, trembling fugitive to a happy, sarcastic man whose wit could give Tony Stark a run for his money. A man whose dark eyes lit up when he laughed, a man whose easy chuckle could shift the atmosphere of a room. A man who, in the end, had given his life protecting others. Banner used to joke that he wasn’t really an Avenger, only the Hulk was. But down to his dying breath, the man had been a hero, an Avenger, and a friend. Somehow, it didn’t seem possible for such a vivacious soul to be reduced to the husk sitting on the table before him. 

Some of his thoughts must have shown on his face, because when Steve raised his eyes to look at Natasha, she gave him a soft, watery smile that reminded him so much of Bruce, it was almost painful. She looked about to say something, but was interrupted by the swish of the door opening. Four lifeless eyes looked up to meet a single, staring gaze.

“I had hoped the reports were incorrect,” Fury sighed when his eyes fell on the corpse. He brought a dark hand up to squeeze the bridge of his nose for a moment, huffing a breath before continuing.

“You’ve all had a long day. I think you need to eat, shower, and sleep, in that order. We’ll take care of Banner.”

“‘A long day?’ That’s all you can say?” Tony growled, “Look at him, Fury. Fucking take a good look. This is as much your fault as it is ours. You refused to get involved, refused to lend more than your under-the-table support in finding him. Was it worth it? To have the council off your back? Was it fucking worth it?”

“Stark!” Steve snapped, turning a heavy glare on the billionaire.

“No, I’m done. I’m done playing soldier and I’m done listening to your bullshit. All of you, out. I need a minute with Bruce. Alone.”

Steve sighed at the same time as Fury, causing the soldier to look up in surprise at the director. He had never seen the man look so conflicted. With a nod in the direction of Clint and Natasha, he left without further discussion. One by one, the other Avengers filed out. Clint brought his brow to Bruce’s forehead one last time, whispering something in his ear that no one else was able to catch. Natasha took a moment to give his hand a final squeeze before pressing a kiss to his temple, the same spot he had always rubbed when he had a headache coming on. Steve brushed the man’s curls from his brow in a rare gesture of tenderness from the soldier, before quickly pulling his hand away and leaving the room with a final, guilt-laced glance at their fallen friend.

In the hallway, Steve couldn’t meet the eyes of the agents, instead taking off in a brisk walk to chase after Fury. The director seemed to sense someone behind him, because he had stopped a few doors down from the medbay, watching the Captain expectantly.

“What’s going to happen to him?” Rogers asked before he could stop himself. Part of him didn’t want to know, but even in death, his friend’s corpse was still dangerous. It was bad enough the military had his blood, no one else needed to be able to get their hands on it.

“Cremation, it’s what he would have wanted. We’ll have a ceremony for him, and then we will give the ashes to you to do with what you like. He has no other family, and wasn’t very well liked even before the accident, so you’re it. You, Barton, Romanoff, Stark… you’re his only family, now. We’ll invite others, of course, like his old fling Elizabeth Ross and some of the few friends he has managed to keep over the years. All you need to worry about is making sure the other Avengers don’t do something….unwise in their grief. The last thing we need is another one of you in trouble with the law,” Fury answered, his voice back to his full bravado. It almost made Steve want to punch him. Almost.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll tell the others,” he responded instead, turning to leave without being dismissed. If he stayed any longer, the director might have to wear two eyepatches instead of one. The man seemed to sense this, as he turned around and walked the other way without so much as a grunt in the soldier’s direction. Steve paused to listen to him go before joining the Natasha and Clint at the door. The medbay windows had been darkened, leaving no glimpse of what was happening inside the room. But of any of them, it was clear Stark needed the privacy the most. While they had all grown close, Tony was the one who had found a best friend in Bruce, someone who was his equal and superior in many things. Without him, Steve wondered if Tony would even continue to be an Avenger. He was barely on friendship terms with the rest of the team.

As soon as the door closed, Tony began searching through drawers. Finally, he found what he was looking for. A vial of epinephrine, enough for twelve doses.

Or one dose for a giant, he thought as he dug around for the largest syringe he could find. When he finally located one that could hold all of the liquid, his heart was racing in his chest. He could almost feel the hum of the vibranium in his sternum, even though his reactor had been removed ages ago.

Only when the syringe was filled did Tony finally approach the bed, trying not to notice the dead eyes of his friend. For a moment, the engineer hesitated. He wasn’t a doctor, had never even seen the inside of a medical school, let alone taken a course. He knew enough about general health, sure, but this….Did he really want to do this?

Before he could talk himself out of it, Tony jammed the needle right through Bruce’s chest, on the side of his sternum and between his ribs, straight to his heart. The liquid injected slowly, and the billionaire forced himself to look into Bruce’s eyes, hoping to see a spark of life there. But as the needle emptied, all he saw was his own reflection in the man’s empty stare. With a curse, Tony flung the needle across the room and slammed his fist into Bruce’s chest, then gathered him gently in his arms and cried into the hollow of his throat. His temple rested where the physicist’s pulse should have been, and it only made the man sob harder into the cold, frozen skin under his cheek.

“I’m sorry, Bruce, I’m so sorry,” he whispered breathlessly, letting his tears wash away some of the blood from his friend’s shoulder.

Suddenly, it was all too much. Tony couldn’t be there anymore, couldn’t be there with the reminder of how much he had failed his only true friend. All that mattered now was that someone paid for this senseless cruelty, and Tony knew just where to find him. After all, what kind of an Avenger was he if he let Ross get away?

So lost in his grief and anger, Tony stalked out of the room without noticing the green tinge beginning to manifest on his friend’s corpse.