Chapter 9
“Agent Coulson is down.”
Fury’s voice rumbled across the comms, and even as it did, Steve knew what had happened. Below him on the catwalk, still in his armor, he knew Stark did too.
“A medical team is on its way to your location,” someone else frantically assured Fury.
“They’re here,” he replied, finality in his voice. “They called it.”
The rushing wind from the gaping hole in the side of the Chimera couldn’t quite draw out the acrid smell of burnt plastic or charred metal nor of the blood seeping through the grates at their feet. Four men died, at least on their end, but not before the damage was done. The flying ship listed, ominously as Stark cursed over a heaved sigh, running a scratched and battered gauntlet over his sweat-soaked hair.
It wasn’t the first time Steve had lost in a fight, not even close to it, but it hurt like it was. They’d been warned, and still, that son-of-a-bitch had gotten to them, and they’d allowed it to happen. He’d allowed it to happen, turning on Stark in that lab in a way he’d never have normally done. He’d been raised to be better than that, to never sink to the bully’s petty level, and there he’d been taunting him to get into the suit, to show what a big man he was. Where had that come from? Now, people are dead because of it.
He gathered his wits from somewhere, finding the center that he had always leaned on to take charge when all the world was falling around his ears, the familiar space of calm he’d been searching for ever since waking up in that lab weeks ago. He assessed the situation. He was bruised and battered, but nothing that wouldn’t heal quickly with the serum in his veins.
“You alright, Stark?”
The other man grimaced, but nodded, bending down to scoop up the scratched and scraped helmet from at his feet. “I’ll live.”
There was implicit in those words a certain sense of guilt he had when Coulson had not. Steve could understand that all too well. “We should find the others.”
“Yeah,” Stark grunted, waiting as Steve dropped the few feet to drop him on the shaky remains of the steel structure. His face was sporting the makings of a truly spectacular black eye, but he shrugged it off with a rueful pull of a faint smile. “Got a good look at the turbines at least. Could give Fury some suggestions.”
“Sorry.” Steve eyed the target Stark had taken out at the end, lying unconscious in the corner. In the end, it worked neatly. Stark could be a team player when he chose to be, especially when things were hot. The angry words they’d both fired at one another churned shamefully in his mind.
“Yeah, well, you had your hands full.”
“Thanks for the assist.”
“Anytime,” Stark returned, lacking any of the smart-ass cockiness from before.
It wasn’t a fix to what was said before, but it was a truce. “We need to get upstairs, find out the situation, and call medical care on anyone here who's alive enough to need it.”
That idea didn’t look as if it sat well with Stark, not in light of Coulson’s death at least, but he went along with it. “I suppose. I need to get this armor off, it got chewed up by that turbine.”
“You go and take care of that, I’ll connect with whoever is manning the helm. We can meet up there in an hour for a debrief.”
At least Stark didn’t argue with him on that. They went inside, where SHIELD personnel rushed through the various catwalks and platforms in a flurry of frantic activity. A fire somewhere billowed black smoke, but the ship seemed stable in the air for the moment.
“Whose bright idea was to make one of these fly,” Stark muttered, shooting a nervous eye out the way they had come.
“If I could venture a guess, your father’s. He was always trying to get a car to fly, why not an aircraft carrier?”
Steve half expected Stark to snap back at that. The subject of Howard was clearly a touchy one with him. Instead, he snorted, dryly, perhaps too tired to be angry about it. “Yeah, it would be the half-baked sort of notion Howard would have. If there is an afterlife and if Howard is in it, I will need to thoroughly kick his ass.”
There was a veritable minefield of things Steve didn’t completely understand, and he knew it. “Get out of your suit. I’ll meet you top side.”
Stark did as he was bid, moving slowly with the scratched and bent panels along the side. Steve watched him go long enough to ensure he’d make it to the bay where their gear was being stowed before slipping his shield onto his back in a long practiced move. He turned towards the bridge, moving around panicked teams, few of whom had time to stare as he entered the command center. What had been a gleaming space of metal and chrome just minutes ago was a wreck, a haze of smoke lingering, broken glass and blasted metal littering the bridge, as medical teams performed triage on bleeding members of the crew. All around was an air of mild chaos, and Fury was nowhere to be seen. For that matter, neither was Peggy, as it hit him the last he’d seen her was in the lab, just before the explosion that had sent everything to hell. Fury’s right hand was there, Maria Hill, sitting on the steps leading up to the conference area, a deep gash along the side of her forehead, soot, and blood staining her form-fitting jacket. She was allowing a medical official to finish bandaging a suture on her brow with a distant, dark glower.
“How bad is it?”
Hill stirred, gently waving off the medical team member before answering him. “You heard the news?”
He nodded, curtly. “Yeah.”
“We had one more casualty up here, plus the wounded.” She waved her hand towards where the white coats huddled. “Burns, shrapnel, a lot of bumps and bruises. I don’t know the full report yet, that’s still coming in. Hulk and Thor did a number on the hangar and several other decks, not to mention one fighter jet. No one was hurt, but we do have to fish a pilot out of the ocean.”
It could be worse, he reminded himself. “Where’s Fury?”
“Assessment below. How about your team?”
She knew more about them than Steve did. “We have targets down, they will need medical treatment, likely somewhere where they can be locked up and watched to see if they are still under Loki’s mind control. Stark is getting out of his armor, he was banged up but will survive. Romanoff, last I heard, was en route to Barton.”
“She has him. Had to knock him out, but he’s being sequestered and Dr. Ross is giving him something to hopefully override the brainwashing.”
That was promising, at least. “You know as much about Thor and Banner as I do. What about Loki?”
“Gone,” she barked, pushing herself up off the stairs in frustration. “Fled on a waiting transport after he took out Coulson. He has his magic scepter and the Tesseract, and in the chaos, we weren’t able to get a beat on him. He’s fled who knows where, and our comms are down. We have engineering and tech on it, but who knows when we will get a signal up to get information back. Till then we are blind and unable to move.”
Loki couldn’t have been more thorough in his success if he had tried. “At least the ship is still in the air, else more lives would have been lost. We are bruised and battered, but we aren’t down yet.”
Hill blinked at him, as if surprised he could say something like that given what she had just told him. Perhaps in her world, she would be. Steve had the distinct impression few people were that optimistic in this world, save for those like Coulson.
“First priority is seeing those injured to the medical wing, and then see what you can do about getting those comms up,” he ordered, falling into the role without thinking. “I’ll get whoever is left up here, then we can see where we are at and figure out how to move forward.”
If Hill was offended by him giving objectives, she didn’t say anything. “I’ll man that. Meanwhile, I’ll see where Fury is.”
It was a plan to help them move forward, something to give them momentum and find their bearings after Loki cut their feet out from under them. The familiarity of it grounded him as he took stock of the bridge, the personnel piecing it back together. He saw Cassie on her portable phone - that still worked there - but it seemed that little else did at the moment.
He regarded Hill with her sutured eyebrow. “Did you get looked at yourself?”
She nodded. “I’ll have a headache later, I’m sure, but I’ll survive. Carter wandered through here a few minutes ago, by the way, with a gash on her forehead and covered in blood. I’m not sure how much of it is hers.”
A cold spike of fear crawled up through his gut, an irrational pang of panic at the possibility of yet another loss in his life, but reason grabbed him and shook him. Peggy was always able to take care of herself, often better than he ever did personally. She was strong and able and didn’t need him pushing his worries and loss on her.
“I sent her on to get cleaned up. She’s probably in the women’s locker area right now.” Hill’s obvious hint wasn’t lost on him. “You know, since you are checking on your team.”
Perhaps he had irked her with the peremptory bossing around, or more likely it was just Hill quietly giving him leave to ensure Peggy was safe. Whatever the case, he took it. “I’ll find her.”
He didn’t miss Hill’s pleased nod as he marched off, through the maze of hallways in the interior of the ship. For all the Chimera took a hit, those spaces not connected to the bridge, lab, or engines were fairly untouched. The common areas felt eerily quiet as he wandered to the dressing rooms. No one was even there, as most were trying to either put the ship back together or figure out what steps to take next.
The lounge area that sat between the men’s and women’s dressing rooms was empty save for him as he wandered in, eyeing the open doorway into the ladies’ private territory. Hoping she would wander out soon, he slipped off his shield, settling it onto one of the couches as he unzipped his newer, lighter tactical armor. This he tossed beside the shield, tugging at the lightweight, long-sleeved undershirt, loosening it from his sticky skin. Silence rang, and he heard nothing from the dressing room as he waited and wondered.
“Peggy,” he called, hoping she was somewhere close enough to hear him and respond. The doorways to the dressing rooms were open and wide, with an offset wall that shut out the most private areas of the space from any outside eyes. Given the situation they were in, he highly doubted anyone else was in there, but long training and the fear of the wrath of Winifred Barnes had long ago inured Steve from simply walking into such a space without a warning. But no voice called back in response, either in dismay or invitation.
Steve could hear sobbing. They were the horrible, broken, ugly kind he once heard long ago on the other side of his bedroom door, as he lay in the darkness on his thin bed listening to his mother’s heartbroken cries. As they had back then, they made his heart pull painfully in his chest as he moved without thinking through the doorway, uncaring about who else was in there or in what state. Blessedly, there was no one else there, naked or otherwise, save for the huddled figure of Peggy on the floor, knees curled up to her forehead as her whole body shook with her cries.
It hurt to see that, more than it did taking a bullet or a fist to the face. His brilliant, capable, rock-steady Peggy so rarely cried. He had witnessed it only twice before - once on the radio as he plunged to what he thought would be his death, and again when he woke to what turned out to be his second chance. He realized then how much he hated it.
“Peggy,” he murmured, sliding onto the bench in front of her, startling her as he did. Before she could make to protest, he was already pulling her up to the bench beside him, wrapping arms around her, holding her close. For long moments they sat there as she cried herself out, wrapped up in the silence of shared frustration, loss, and anger.
She finally did pull away, though, pulling herself together with a sniff, and reaching for a soft, white towel to wipe at her puffy, damp eyes. “You do realize this is the ladies’ locker room,” she dropped, dryly, trying for humor, a typical Peggy emotional evasion tactic.
“I think everyone is busy at the moment, so I’m not worried.” He reached to push back a lock of dark hair off her flushed face, wincing to see a line of stark, black threads holding together an angry, red welt just where her forehead met her hairline. “Hill made it sound as if you were gushing from a head wound.”
“It was gushing,” she confirmed, waving to a pile of blood-stained clothes on the floor at her feet. “I’m fine now.”
His mother always said head wounds bled the most. Still, it disconcerted him to see it, and worse to see her fall apart like this. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” she sighed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. “You heard about Coulson?”
“I did.” Coulson had said he would talk to Peggy about her past, her old life, about Steve. He’d been her willing ear when she had no one else to talk to about those things who would appreciate them. Now he was gone. “I know he was your friend.”
“He looked up to you,” she choked out, her voice breaking as she sniffed, more tears threatening. “I know he likely did something foolish, making a stand when he didn’t have to. He should have called one of us in.”
Steve had a feeling that her frustration at the moment wasn’t directed at Phil Coulson and the way he died. “Maybe,” he hedged, reaching a thumb to catch an errant tear and wipe it away. “He didn’t. He knew what he was getting into, Peggy.”
Her dark eyes met his, catching and boring into him with all the doubt and uncertainty he rarely ever saw Peggy succumb to. “Did he?”
Steve knew that she wasn’t just talking about Coulson now. “One doesn’t go into this line of work without it, I think.”
It didn’t appease her, not that he expected it to. Instead, she worried about another line of attack. “We were so caught up in our arguments, our squabbles. It was what Loki wanted us to do.”
“Yeah,” he sighed, softly, holding her closer. Peggy’s words tapped into the guilt gnawing at him since Fury’s voice had called it out on the comms. “If splitting us up was what he wanted, he did a rather spectacular job at that. That was…I don’t even know what.”
He thought he’d come into all of this fairly reasonably, all things considered. From the moment they had captured Loki and brought both he and that damned scepter on board, everything had felt sharp, on edge, as if all the anxiety, dread, and simmering resentments he had ever felt were bubbling just under the surface of his skin, waiting to have a reason to burble over into a fight. Already thrown off kilter by everything over the last few weeks, it had coalesced into something ugly, petty, and mean, particularly directed at Stark. Why him was not as clear, save for the fact that Stark’s personality lent itself to triggering every single fuse Steve had in regards to people he disliked - grandstanders, bullies, and those who loved setting themselves up above others. He had no evidence that Stark was any of those things, and in fact, Steve had gotten on remarkably well with his father considering he displayed some of the same high-handed, self-involved, egotistical personality traits. For whatever reason, however, Stark had rubbed him the wrong way and he had lashed out in a fashion that confused and embarrassed him. He had never been like that! Had he really threatened Stark like a thug in a back alley, daring him to go rounds to prove a point?
“It was as if every private thing we are thinking, every little worry or fear, just came bubbling out into the open.”
“Something like that.” Steve’s skin crawled with the memory of it, of things spilling out of him he never would have said otherwise. Over it all was the sound of terror, raw and sharp, the primal sound of fear and the knowledge of one’s imminent demise. “You know, it was the damnedest thing. Standing there in that lab, everyone arguing, in the back of my mind I kept hearing it over and over…the sound of Bucky’s screaming as he fell.”
Peggy stared up at him in horror then. Steve supposed it sounded crazy, but what wasn’t crazy about this entire mess?
“Anyway,” he brushed it off, along with the horrible memory of Bucky’s fall. “I kept hearing that sound, and there was Stark bragging about being able to fly to get the stone, and it just… something snapped. I don’t know, he treats everything like it’s a joke, all smiles, and cheap quips, pulls the spotlight on him and makes out how amazing he is. And all I could think of was Bucky falling to his death and dying to save people...to save me in that moment...and no one remembers him, what a good man he was, or what he even did. He laid on that wire for me and I won’t ever get him back. Stark acts like this is all a game, that he can outthink the situation by being more clever and he can walk out of it without a scratch, without truly having to give up anything. He doesn't understand that you might have to go into any of this knowing you won’t come out, knowing what you will miss because of it.
“Like you did,” Peggy observed, sadly. “Like Barnes.”
“Like Coulson,” Steve added, though it pained him to say it.
He felt more than saw Peggy wince at that. He tightened his grip on her, briefly, before letting her go, running his hands through his sweat-and-soot-covered hair. “Anyway, that was what led me to act like a jackass in there. I suppose a part of me wanted to fight him, even in the suit, to prove to him it wasn’t about being more clever than the next guy. It was dumb, it was childish, and I don’t know what to say beyond that.”
Shame for his actions was not something Steve felt often, at least not much beyond his childhood escapades with Bucky. Before he could wallow in self-recrimination too far, however, Peggy’s hand reached for his, lacing her fingers in between his own.
“It wasn’t like you,” she admitted, softly, more worried than recriminating. “You are not a bully, you never were. That scepter hit us all where it hurts.”
Whatever it was, it was terrifyingly effective. “You know it likely wouldn’t have if we weren’t all working on our own agendas. We each wanted to do our own thing and not work as a team. We weren’t even united to start.”
“No,” she murmured, focused on where their hands met, regret and frustration thick in her voice. “Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to make this work.”
Ahh, Peggy, he sighed to himself, seeing in her the same recrimination he too felt. She blamed herself, and she shouldn’t. The job of making this work wasn’t hers alone. He was as much to blame. Some leader he turned out to be. When the chips were down, he had failed as well. Still, in that failure, there was at least something to take away. Steve had had his ass handed to him too many times in his lifetime to ever let failure stop him, and in each of those beatdowns, there was something he learned, something that he gained from it. Today, perhaps, he had learned something about himself, however much he disliked it. He at least now knew what sort of things he was capable of when his trauma and hurt were turned against him. But he also thought he understood something that Peggy said to him long ago a bit better.
“You know, on one of the worst days of my life, a wise woman once came up to me in a blown-out pub while I was desperately trying to get drunk and feel sorry for myself. She told me, very profoundly, that I shouldn’t borrow guilt from Bucky’s death. After all, he felt I was worth it.”
He tightened his hand around her fingers where they still lay twined with his. “Coulson must have felt that we, the Avengers, that we’re worth it. And even if he had his doubts, I suppose it is up to us to prove his faith wasn’t misplaced.”
She turned her lovely, tear-stained face up to him, smiling as if he were some sort of wonder. “You really are remarkable sometimes.”
“After the last few hours, I honestly don’t know about that.” He stood, gently pulling her up off the bench with him. The harsh, white light of the dressing room caught at the ugly black stitches along her hairline, stark against the paleness of her skin. He couldn’t help but pause to reach and tilt her head down to get a better look, much as his mother would have done.
“I promise I’m not dying,” she murmured, more than a bit petulant at being manhandled like a child. Steve ignored her as he tried to get a better look.
“No,” he admitted, satisfied with the work of the SHIELD doctors. “But I see why you bled everywhere. The stitches are neat. What did they seal it with?”
“Some sort of adhesive, a SHIELD product. It doesn’t even pull!” She looked up at him through her lashes, her eyes nearly crossing with the effort in a way both endearing and impatient. “Does it meet with the Captain Rogers' stamp of approval?”
“My mother would be impressed,” he returned, which for him was the highest praise he could give it. He sobered, though, on recollection of how she got her latest scar. “I didn’t see you were hurt, else I would have stopped.”
“I can take care of myself, Rogers,” she shot back, though without heat, as she stayed nestled close. He knew she could, but he couldn’t help but smile, just a bit, that as she said it she wasn’t moving far away from him either. For long moments Steve simply stood there, his best gal in his arms, and the world of aliens, magic crystals, and brainwashed comrades stood still for just a moment as he simply held her, wishing they could stay in this moment.
But duty called. Behind them, a soft, delicate cough caught his ear, and he turned to see Cassie standing there, watching them with a blush on her cheeks, looking apologetic that she even had to break their brief idle. “Fury is getting everyone together upstairs.”
That broke the spell. Peggy pulled away with just a hint of regret. She grabbed a jacket she hadn’t worn that morning, likely one of Hill’s “Right, is Stark up there?”
“Yeah, Romanoff is in with Barton and Ross. He’s not come around yet, but the two men you hit with it finally have.” Cassie didn’t clarify what “it” was, and neither did Peggy, who already moved to meet up with her right hand. “Turns out neither is SHIELD, just mercenaries turned with Loki’s scepter.”
That was what Steve had wondered about the men he and Stark had dealt with. Did any of them even know what they were doing before they attacked? He would never know.
“And the third one, the one I left bleeding,” Peggy asked, as cool as if she were asking for the weather. That she had left someone bleeding had somehow escaped him, but somehow he wasn’t shocked.
“Still in surgery, but I’m guessing the same story there,” Cassie returned.
If she kept at this they would be here all day. He gently tugged her arm. “Let’s head upstairs.”
She reluctantly nodded and followed. They needed to see what the damages were and figure out how to regroup. And somehow, he and the others needed to figure out how to make this work as a team. More than any of that, however, they needed to figure out Loki’s next steps.
After all, Steve didn’t think he could live with the idea of a good man like Coulson dying for nothing.