carry me out
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 12:45 AM
While the rest of the Avengers go to New Hampshire to help Peter Parker, Happy stays behind so that he can break Tony out of the lab. They go to the airport, squeeze on a quick flight, and meet Bruce Banner at what’s left of the Avenger’s compound upstate.
The whole place is nearly empty now, Pepper having moved most of the company back into the Tower downtown, but there’s still some remnants of Tony left here. The Quinjet is there as well, settled nicely on the landing pad, dusty and unused. The lab, of course, is still intact; however, their house is empty.
She’d forgotten how angry she was just a couple months ago, how much violent rage she held towards her fiancé. She wonders if she could find the ring she threw away back in April if she searched the nearby grass. It’s just a ring , Tony would say. I’ll buy you another one .
Pepper, very pregnant and not wanting to risk the baby, stays behind; she manages to get ahold of Banner, so he comes to the compound within the hour, pacing the length of the house with them as they await Romanoff’s signal. There’s some kind of hostage situation going on—but hopefully, Peter will be okay. “He’s a strong kid,” says Bruce Banner, adjusting his classes. “I’m sure he’s okay.”
Pepper purses her lips. Bruce didn’t see the livestream that they did. At the bare minimum, Peter would need severe medical attention and lots of nourishment. “Yeah,” she says. He’d been tortured for months, and where had they been?
They get Romanoff’s signal around 1:00 AM, when Happy says, “Ready?”
Bruce nods, cracking his knuckles and then his back; he transforms quickly and efficiently as they leave the house giant and angry and green and remarkably calm. Pepper watches the whole thing from a body-camera on Happy’s suit. The Hulk tears away the sheet-metal doors in one go, finding the weak spots in the metal and peeling them apart like a mandarin orange. It’s a quiet, composed operation—that frantic tone of fear has left them now that they know Peter Parker is safe.
Inside, Tony is in the main room, kneeled in front of the television like a layman at a prayer bench, one hand pressed to the dark screen. Even as Happy and Bruce enter the room, he doesn’t seem to move, simply clutching a corded housephone in one hand.
Pepper remembers what happened the last time they tried to force him from the lab: him waving a gun around like a lunatic, shooting at Rhodey and her, him jamming the muzzle of the gun into his own chin… It was terrifying .
But this… This is what Tony’s like now? Calm, still, subdued? It’s unnerving.
As the two men—one human, one monster—get closer, Tony seems to hear it, because he turns his head slightly, dulled gaze landing on the two of them. “Oh,” he says calmly, like he’s seeing a pizza delivery man instead of his concerned friends. He turns back to the television, eyes still glued there. “Dum-E,” he says, speaking to his armed robot, “get me, uh, four hundred milligrams of amisulpride, please. In the little tablets, okay, not the ones I gotta—gotta choke down. And some water, too.”
Confused, Happy and Bruce take another couple steps forward as the little robot rolls across the room. “Tony,” tries Happy, rounding to the side of the television to try to get his attention. He doesn’t seem wounded, just tired, so they approach him slowly. “Listen to me. We’re here to break you out. We rescued Peter—they’re bringing him to a hospital ASAP. You’re free.”
He ignores them, choosing instead to stare wholeheartedly at the television screen. Amisulpride , Pepper thinks, and she googles it quickly on her smartphone. It’s an antipsychotic, she realizes. Meant for schizophrenics and acute hallucinations. He’s been prescribing himself anti-hallucinogenic drugs?
The realization comes too slowly. He’s been hallucinating them. Coming to save him, probably, just like Happy and Bruce are doing now. He thinks he’s seeing things.
Pepper grasps her phone and heads for the lab; Tony’s clearly not a danger to anyone anymore. She needs to prove to him that they’re real. Over Happy’s body-cam, they try to convince Tony they’re real, but he continues to ignore them, shuffling around the lab and taking a small cup of pills before settling in front of the television again.
Ankles aching, Pepper makes it to the lab in a couple minutes, and she bursts inside through the peeled-open doors.
The lab looks like something out of A Beautiful Mind. Papers line every inch of every wall, taped to the floor, the ceiling, the tables, the cabinets. He’s scribbled on bare walls and more, on ceilings and doors, math formulas and chemistry equations and design sketches. His handwriting varies from neat print to crazed scribbles. Stacks and stacks of papers line the floor, so much that there’s barely anywhere to step. There’s half-created weaponry all over—pistols and cannons and automatic guns, all lit with this strange blue light.
Oh. This is what he’s been doing this whole time. That’s why he’s locked in his lab.
They took Peter to force Tony to create weapons.
“Happy, is he armed?” she demands.
“No, ma’am.”
Holding her belly, she runs to him as well as she can, kneeling awkwardly beside him and grabbing him by the arm. “Tony,” she says then, hoping he doesn’t flip out like last time. “Tony, look at me .”
“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, without a moment of hesitation, but her fiancé—ex-fiancé—doesn’t look at her. Still in that dull monotone. “Always good to see you.”
He talks to his other robot then, muttering under his breath about other antipsychotics and drug interactions. Didn’t he see what happened to Peter? Didn’t he see the rescue?
Right. Another hallucination.
“Dum-E, bring up Queens Project Mark 49. And bring up the last stats for, uh, blast radius in testing.”
She shakes his arm again, hard. “Tony! Hey! It’s me!”
Then she pinched the skin of his elbow. This seems to wake him a little, because he shifts his arm away from her. Tony looks at her this time; such a sadness pervades his face that she places a hand on her belly. “Tony,” she says. “I’m real. Happy’s real. This is all…real, okay, honey? I’m really here. Peter—he’s safe. We got him. We got him out.”
His eyes flicker down to her pregnant stomach; his expression melts from melancholy to confusion. “You’re…”
“Yes!” she assures, nodding, almost ready to cry.
He stops talking. He just stares at her with that familiar I’ll-figure-it-out way. Suddenly, he’s Tony again: Tony the mechanic. “Dum-E,” he says, “scan the room for heat signatures.”
A beep of affirmation.
“How—how many, buddy?”
Four succinct beeps from the little robot.
Tony falls backwards so suddenly that Pepper reaches out to catch him by the wrist. He’s lighter, a little thinner. His hair’s scraggly and much grayer, more salt than pepper. His beard’s a couple inches long, like he hasn’t shaved since April—both his hair and his beard are tangled into mats, and he reeks of body odor and sweat. He’s like something out of Castaway . It’s so typical of Tony not to take care of himself into the work is done. “Pepper,” he says, tired surprise lighting his eyes. “Pepper?”
“Yes,” she says, firmly. “It’s me.”
He’s shaken. Confused. Still a little slow. But for once, he seems like he’s listening. “But…” His face seems to cave in, crumpling like a pine tree under the force of an avalanche. Then, in an exhausted, miserable tone: “Is he dead?”
“No,” she says, “he’s safe. We got him, Tony. He’s free. We’ve got him. We’ve got him.”
“You…” His gears are turning, spinning and clicking in that brain of his. “But…”
“He’s safe,” she assures him, grasping his upper arm. “Tony, he’s free. Steve and Barnes and the others—they broke into the bunker and got him. They’re gonna be locked up. All of them. Didn’t you see, on the livestream? They got him out.”
“Out,” Tony echoes, disbelief written all over his face. He scratches at his matted hair, turning to look around the room. All of his movements are jerky and strange, like that of a broken wind-up toy. “But I thought… I thought…”
“They’re okay,” she says. “Everyone’s okay.” His hand’s trembling badly, his fingers twitchy and strange. Not in an emotional way—but the way he used to shake when his arc reactor was poisoning him. Medically troubling trembling. “We can take you to him, sweetheart. They’re gonna bring him to a hospital in New Hampshire. You wanna see him?”
He nods emptily. He still seems confused.
Pepper leads him to the doorway, Happy and the Hulk at their heels, and he lingers there, halting his feet at the threshold. “Tony,” she says, tugging his hand. “It’s okay.”
Still Tony pauses, now seeming wildly unsure. “I can’t,” he says, suddenly breathless and blinking. “I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—” He backs up, tripping backwards over his feet, and the Hulk catches him; he startles at the sudden touch. “Banner,” he says, as if seeing him for the first time. “What are you… When…”
“He’s with me, Tony. He came here to make sure you were okay.”
“They never hurt me,” says Tony emptily. “They never… They only…” He presses at the side of his head as though from a sudden migraine, and he rubs at his forehead, eyes scanning the room once more. “Dum-E,” he says again. “Heat signatures. Heat signatures.”
Again, four beeps from the robot.
Frustrated, he says again, waving his hands at the robot, “Heat signatures, Dum-E! I said heat signatures!”
Despite his name, the little robot is highly intelligent. Slowly, loudly, it beeps again: one, two, three, four.
“Tony, look at me.” That shattered gaze meets hers, his usual Stark beard unrecognizable, the dark circles under his eyes dark and cutting. “Peter’s safe. He’s safe , you understand me? The Avengers rescued him. He’s okay. It’s over—it’s over .”
He shakes his head. “He’s safe?” Tony whispers. “He… Are you… Are you sure?”
“Yes, honey. Yes. Yes. He’s safe. They’re not gonna hurt him again. You’re free. We got Peter out. You’re free.”
The man crumples then, falling hard on one knee, the other, slumping sideways like a man who hasn’t slept in a year; for the second time, the Hulk catches him in his green arms and helps him up, bracing him easily with one arm. “Peter… Peter got out?”
There’s a stone in her throat now, making swallowing suddenly painful. “Yes, baby,” she says, close to tears. “Yes, yes, he got out. He got out. He’s gonna be okay.” Still in Hulk form, Banner helps him to the doorway, and this time he halts at the doorway for only a second, looking at Pepper to confirm. “It’s okay, honey, nothing’s gonna happen. It’s okay—come on.” She helps him through, and at last he takes a step outside, blinking like he’s never seen the sidewalk before, glancing back at the lab like a child who’s left his room past bedtime.
“Where is he?” Tony whispers, his words stilted and dry. “Can I… Can I…”
Pepper rubs his hand; she hasn’t touched him in months, and it’s like coming home. “Yeah. Let’s go see the kid.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 1:11 AM
Clint walks little Cassie all the way to an emergency clinic at the base of the mountain, carrying her the entire way.
He half-expects the girl to fall asleep in his arms like his son usually does, but she only seems to grow more agitated as time goes on, shaking and crying.
When they reach the clinic, the employees there very quickly admit that they don’t have the resources to fix her up, neither are they enhanced-friendly, so they get an ambulance ride to the nearest major hospital in the state, one near a college in central New Hampshire. It’s swarmed with college students, elderly people, and little kids getting checkups, so they’re not exactly prepared when a man dressed in a purple jumpsuit and a bloodied little girl with a buzz-cut burst out of the ambulance.
“H-Hawkeye,” gasps one of the doctors who greets the ambulance. The woman quickly swallows her awe, though, turning her attention to the bloody girl in his arms. “What do we got, Max?” she asks the paramedic, a person with short, curly hair who’s pushing the stretcher.
Clint supposes it makes sense in a county so small that the paramedics and doctors would know each other.
Max gives a short nod. “Seven-year-old female, vitals stable, severely malnourished, chief complaint of neck and head pain, crushed hand, resistant to treatment so far—she’s tachycardic, pulse at two-hundred—we haven’t been able to calm her down.” The paramedics couldn’t even get a cervical collar around her neck while she was in the ambulance; Clint can’t imagine what her kidnappers did to her to make her this frightened.
One of the doctors isn’t listening, approaching the girl in Clint’s arms—the kid starts screaming bloody murder as soon as the doctor puts her hands on her, so she quickly retracts her gloved fingers. Another tries to prod at her bloodstained head and she shrieks so loud that everyone nearby jumps. This isn’t gonna be easy. Cassie’s crying harder now, her little arms clasped tightly around Clint’s neck, like it’s the only thing keeping her from descending into the belly of a volcano.
Max the paramedic continues, “No evident trauma, but…” The paramedic looks to Clint, suddenly, discomfort flashing across their face.
Clint clears his throat. “She was… She was kidnapped.” Every doctor in the place seems to pause. “She’s been missing for four months. Her name’s Cassandra Paxton-Lang.”
The main doctor looks stiff now, but she keeps going, following the stretcher as it pushes through the hospital’s double doors. “Let’s just take them to trauma room one. Sir—are you hurt?”
She’s talking to him . “No,” he says. “Just the girl.”
“Alright—you okay to carry her? Doesn’t seem like she’s letting go anytime soon.”
“Yeah,” he answers. “I got her.”
“Alright—follow me.”
Cassie curls tighter into his arms; Clint hears her whispering under her breath, shakily, for Peter.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 1:29 AM
When they escort Tony out of his lab, he shakes so violently that he falls several times. Why the hell is he trembling so much? Happy and Pepper help him to the compound’s landing pad and into the Quinjet, where a pilot waits for them; they’re going to fly out to New Hampshire and pick up the Avengers and Peter. A jet is faster than a plane any day.
Tony is in a daze the whole flight, barely there, staring off into space and muttering to himself. Pepper keeps rubbing his hand to try to wake him up. He’s barely real to her, too; this whole flight feels like a fever dream. Happy calls Peter’s friends—Ned and MJ—letting them know that they’ve got Peter and warning them to keep quiet; next he contacts the Medbay at Avengers Tower, telling them to let May Parker know once she wakes.
He’s generally pretty quiet; he keeps glancing at Pepper like she’s a ghost. He keeps getting up and pacing the room in frantic circles, muttering to himself about chemicals and blast radii before slumping into chairs. She manages to get him into the shower at one point—a small cubicle inside the jet that sprays recycled water. It’s mostly meant to clean off the Avengers after a particularly disgusting fight, but it works now, too, cleaning off her fiancé as he braces himself against the glass. When he staggers out, Happy gets him a pair of fresh clothes—he has such trouble putting them on with his twitching limbs that both she and Happy have to help him into them. “Sorry,” he says, as Pepper stares at his trembling hands. “It’s the pills.”
“What pills?” she asks.
“Made some…” His eyes are so bloodshot that his lids are swollen. “…sleeping pills. Not-sleeping pills. Helped me stay up so I—so I could work. Fucked my nervous system.” He blinks at Pepper, still dazed. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she says, hand braced against his back, but she’s not sure what he’s apologizing for. God, his beard is unbearably long. It’s a couple inches long, longer than she’s ever seen it before. Gray and tangled like he’s an old motorcyclist. She asks, quietly, if she can cut it for him; Tony nods vaguely and lifts his chin, baring his neck and closing his eyes like she just asked to slit his throat with a straight-razor. “I meant later,” she says.
He tips his head down.“Sorry,” he says again, like he hasn’t said it a million times already. “I’m so sorry, Pep.” Tony touches her face with his long fingernails, caressing her cheek like he’s blind and she can see, like a child taking a bite of a lemon. “You have to be real… because I never… I never dreamt this.” His gaze drops to her swollen belly. “Is it… Is it mine?” The question is tender, like a rare cut of tenderloin.
“Of course it’s yours,” she says, and her chest burns suddenly.
He slumps forward, clutching her hand in both of his. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “Sorry, I’m sorry…”
Taken aback, she touches his knee, the fabric damp from the shower. “Tony. Tony, honey. Look at me.”
Her fiancé— ex-fiancé? —obeys, that dulled gaze lifting to meet hers. “I forgive you, okay? You did it all for Peter. I understand. I’ve understood for a while.”
Tony barely nods in response, just sighing and tipping his head against her shoulder.
The Quinjet arrives in the White Mountains in a small clearing near the location the others sent— they can see a group of Avengers; the Winter Soldier tugging Captain America’s arm around his shoulders. and Rhodey, full in his suit, carrying a corpse.
Not a corpse. Peter.
God, his hair’s so long. He’s so small. So thin. So pale. It’s doubly horrifying to see him in person rather than on screen, because every pore, every mark, every scar, every bruise is crystal-clear now. Peter looks like something dead, like a deteriorating cadaver or melted clay.
Like a man possessed, Tony staggers out of the jet and towards the pair. “Give him to me,” he chokes out. “Give him…”
Rhodey gives a sharp, concerned look to Pepper, and she nods in response. Rhodey lets go gently, one arm before the other, as though transferring a bomb from his arms to Tony’s.
“Peter,” the man sobs, and he gathers the limp kid into his trembling arms. “Oh, kid… Oh, Peter…” Rhodey braces his arms beneath Tony's, unsure if the shaking man can take the weight. “Oh, god… Oh, my god… My boy…” He holds the kid the way only parents do, tucking the blanket around his bruised neck and tipping his head into the crook of his shoulder. And although his knees waver, Tony stands, lifting up the kid of his own volition, walking back to the Quinjet, still cradling that poor boy.
“Where’s Nat?” asks Bruce, once they’re all in the jet, cracking his knuckles. He’s back in human form now, but his demeanor is just the same: composed and concerned.
Rhodey answers him, watching Tony carefully as he cradles the boy. “She and Wilson stayed behind—had to make sure police showed up to lock those HYDRA guys away.”
Bucky answers him, Steve’s arm still wrapped around his shoulders. “Not HYDRA,” he says curtly, before helping Steve into one of the jet’s medical cots.
For the duration of the plane ride, Tony refuses to let the kid go. He keeps Peter curled up in his lap, wraps him in another blanket with trembling fingers, and holds him like a baby, sobbing. “I’m so sorry,” he chokes out, his voice cracking. “I got you, buddy, I got you…” He brushes the kid’s matted hair away from his face, tucking oily strands behind his ears, then hovering his hand over the bruises on his neck in abject horror.
He repeats all of these phrases like a mantra, like a curse, like a seance: I’m sorry and it’s all my fault and I'm here and forgive me and I've got you now.
Tony’s got the kid’s battered skull, starved torso and skinny limbs all wrapped up like an infant, and there’s something about Peter that makes him seem a dozen years younger than he is—the way his bruised body is tucked into the blanket into Tony’s as he sleeps—the way Tony cradles him, gentle, like Peter’s made of glass. “I’m here,” sobs the billionaire, his hand cupping the nape of his neck, propping his head up with his shoulder. He looks like he’s held the kid a thousand times before; he fits into Tony’s arms like a puzzle piece. “I’m here, Peter… I’m here.”
On the other side of the plane, Steve and Bucky sit next to each other on the floor of the plane; Steve’s sobbing relentlessly into Bucky’s shoulder, Bucky wrapping his arms around the other man. “Your face,” says the Winter Soldier, his voice dark and still. “Who did this.”
It’s not a question; it’s a command.
But Steve doesn’t even respond; he just caves in on himself, his broad shoulders shaking as he cries. “I’ll kill him,” Bucky says.
Steve doesn’t say anything.
It’s a quick flight to the hospital—barely ten minutes.
Clint sends them the address, so the pilot flies a straight-shot to it. There’s a landing pad on the hospital roof; the pilot lands the Quinjet there, where a crowd of paramedics wait in orange vests with a few stretchers. They place Peter into the first stretcher, whisking him away; they try to coax Tony into the second, but he waves them all away before staggering loudly after Peter. The third stretcher takes Steve Rogers, strapping a cervical collar around his neck and encouraging him to lie down, and Bucky rushes after him.
The emergency medical team takes Peter directly inside, where they bring Peter to a trauma room and shut the door. The remaining Avengers—Bruce, Happy, Rhodey, Tony, and Pepper—find themselves in the waiting room.
Pepper fills out form after form—she identifies herself as Peter’s temporary guardian so that she can make medical decisions for him. May can barely talk, so she’s in no place to be moved to another state; she’ll call with any updates and major decisions. Tony doesn’t even fight her on it, either. It’s what makes sense—Pepper is one of the kid’s emergency contacts, in control of Stark Industries, has a stable house and home, and doesn’t have a highly public physical abuse accusation on her head like Tony does. So she fills out all of the forms herself and hands them to the front desk.
They give them as much information as they can: yes, he’s been missing for four months; no , he’s not allergic to any medications; yes, he’s enhanced. Banner has most of his medical records on file, and he transfers the information with a couple taps on his work phone. Tony seems to have the most knowledge of what Peter’s been through, so the doctors whisk him away to talk about Peter’s condition.
When Tony comes back, he slumps into the waiting room chair and tucks his trembling hands under his thighs as he sits, like a second grader in the principal’s office. He mumbles unintelligible to himself and jumps as Pepper touches his arm again, like he forgot she was there.
They’re not there for most of it—but they see the aftermath. One of the doctors staggers out of the exam room with his hand to his chest and faints in the hallway; another doctor only lasts a couple minutes before he stumbles out like a man blinded, passes through the front doors, and crumples onto a bench outside, sobbing.
Those who do manage to keep their cool have this strange, dull look in their eyes—a repressed revulsion, like they’re swallowing knives or choking down vomit. And even still, the rest of the medical team—doctors and nurses and other physicians—all leave the room looking pale and shaken.
This isn’t something the average person can bear to witness.
Tony spends most of the time pacing around the waiting room, squinting at the windows and doors; he can barely sit still. He’s so twitchy ; she wonders what pills he’s been taking.
Eventually a woman comes out, snapping rubber gloves off and tossing them before she approaches them, reknotting her auburn ponytail as she does. “You’re Peter’s family?”
They all give various affirmations; from Tony, a croaky “yes.”
She introduces herself as Dr. Jackson, the head of surgery at the hospital. “He’s stable,” she says, “But he’s in bad shape. It’s clear that during his…” Even the doctor, it seems, has trouble speaking out loud about Peter’s experience. “...time lost, he sustained a lot of consistent damage. The good news, Ms. Potts, is that most of his injuries have healed. Old bone breaks, old lacerations… He looks a lot worse than he is. But he’s severely malnourished, which probably ate away at his enhanced healing; that’s why he looks so…” Dr. Jackson clears her throat. “He’s been eating maybe a fifth of what he should be—another few months of eating like this and he’d probably be dead. Currently, his body is too weak to heal anything properly—we’re just trying to keep him stable for now. And he has a lot of drugs in his system, so we’re trying to flush those out before we give him anything else. I will say he doesn’t have any emergent injuries—nothing fatal, nothing requiring emergency surgery—but I’m a little worried about his throat and his leg. That bone is so shattered…”
Pepper remembers seeing that knee—a mess of flattened muscle and bone, like tenderized meat.
“And his vocal cords,” the doctor continues. “There’s some bad lesions from the strangulation, so I doubt he’ll be able to speak for at least a couple days. Other than that… Keeping him alive is our main priority. We stitched some—some wounds on his back, but we don’t want to put his body through any unnecessary stress right now. If he wasn’t enhanced, he’d be dead a dozen times over. So for now, no surgeries, no resetting bones. We just need to keep him stable.”
The woman keeps echoing those words: stable, stable, stable. “So he’s okay?” asks Pepper.
The doctor presses her lips together. “For now, yes. I can’t make any promises. But if he pulls through, he’s… He’s going to have a rough recovery.”
“Can we see him?” asks Tony, holding himself up with the arm of his chair. “Please, please, I have to see him…”
Dr. Jackson nods. “Yes, of course.” She takes them down the hall, all the way to a door emblazoned 188. They enter the hospital room in pairs: Tony and Pepper, Happy and Rhodey. There’s a nurse inside with scruffy brown hair—she’s adjusting Peter’s leg, soaking pink strips of fiberglass netting in water and looping each strip around his leg and allowing it to dry until it hardens. They must be trying to keep the broken bone stable. “Peter,” says Tony, his voice like cracked plaster. “Peter.” Her fiancé takes a step towards the white-draped bed, and his knees buckle beneath him; Pepper and Happy catch him by both arms, pushing him gently into a nearby chair.
Although frail, Peter looks better, albeit barely; his skin is made of wax-paper, his bones made of cardboard poking through. His small form besieged by white linens and whiter bandages. The kid’s sleeping on his back, his arms bandaged and resting at his sides. A clear-plastic oxygen mask shrouds his nose and mouth, and his head now rests on a soft pillow instead of a shaking hand.
“He’s awake,” says Pepper, the strawberry-blonde woman, taking a couple steps towards the hospital bed. He is. Peter’s eyelids flutter beneath those wax-paper lids, his eyes like pomegranate-seeds rolling dark beneath. Ever so often, his chin lifts and turns, like he’s trying to see, like he’s fighting to open them. None of the rest of his body moves; he’s still, like a paper-mache figurine—his body made of chicken-wire bone, paper-strip skin and resin-glue muscle.
“Yes,” confirms the nurse, still wrapping Peter’s leg. “Didn’t Dr. Jackson tell you? We couldn’t put him all the way out—we’re still working out the other drugs in his system.”
“He can hear me?” whispers Tony, still in the chair. He touches Peter’s hand, like he’s not supposed to, and then grabs one finger at a time, stroking gently, until he’s got the kid by his hand.
The nurse presses her lips together. “I couldn’t be sure,” she says. “It’s probably hazy—but yes, he can probably hear you. ”
Nodding, the trembling man squeezes Peter’s hand, his fingertips barely compressing the kid’s. He leans forward then, whispering something to the kid. She doesn’t hear the words, but she sees her fiancé’s lips move: Hey, buddy. Then he tips his head forward, his forehead eventually resting on Peter’s forearm, his other hand grasping the crook of his elbow.
And, within seconds, he’s asleep.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 —2:16 AM
The bullet wounds in Steve’s chest have mostly healed by virtue of his super-healing, but Bucky’s frankly horrified by the ones in his shoulder. Someone would’ve had to hold a gun to the skin of his shoulder and fire point-blank in order to get that kind of impact on a super-soldier’s muscle. His shoulder’s been wrecked.
The doctors fix up the shoulder neatly, stitching the wounds closed and bandaging it up tight. Steve’s quiet through the entire process, which is unusual for him. He’s not exactly an ideal patient, either—he keeps jerking away from the doctor’s hands; he gets so uncomfortable at the sensation of the stethoscope on his back that he accidentally knocks away the medical cart when he flails.
Bucky grips his hand tight the entire time. “You know, I thought I lost you for a second there, soldier,” he says.
He’s expecting a response like “Can’t get rid of me that easy,” or “No one can keep Captain America down” or something, but instead Steve says tiredly: “Me, too.”
When they get to his head, prodding with rubber-gloved hands and trying to hold his head still, Steve gets a little flighty, ducking their hands and pulling away. “I heal quick,” he says, and there’s a tinge of hysteria to his voice that’s impossible to miss. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Bucky grumbles, “If you don’t let them look at you, I’m moving out.”
So Steve, tense with stress, lets the physicians fix up his head. Most of the cuts are superficial; “Hatchet,” Steve says, when the doctor asks about the mess of bloody bruises on his face and head. They stitch up the worst of the cuts, tape the rest, and prescribe bedrest for the concussions.
And Bucky stays with him through every procedure. The doctors give him fluids to flush the drugs out of his system, as well as some local anesthetic for his wounds, and an orthopedic doctor resets his dislocated thumb. “How’d that happen?” asks Bucky, and when he touches Steve’s knee he flinches.
He flinches.
Bucky draws his hand back; Steve seems to recognize the mistake he made, because he reaches for Bucky’s hand and clasps tightly. “Don’t leave,” Steve says, “please.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” says Bucky.
Steve’s been in a thousand fights—beatings. stabbings, shootouts—but he doesn’t usually come back so quiet that Bucky has to coax every sentence out of him and flinches at small touches.
“Handcuffs,” answers Steve finally, head resting against Bucky’s shoulder, and he doesn’t say anything else.
The doctors seem to filter out until at last there’s just a nurse left, one who adjusts Steve’s IV and switches the fluid bag for a fresh one. “Did you have any other injuries?” she asks.
Steve looks suddenly miserable. “No,” he says. “That’s it.”
He can’t get much of an explanation from Steve. He mentions something about a police officer who got her head smashed in and a little girl who ran through the woods, but not much else.
Steve’s far too quiet.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 2:44 AM
Natasha and Sam turn over fifteen people to the authorities, all involved in Peter’s kidnapping. Many were identified as missing addicts localized in New York, one as a scientist who previously worked for Tony Stark, and the rest remained unidentified, refusing to give their names to the police.
None of them are doing much talking.
Some of them needed medical attention, so they were transferred to a nearby major hospital—somewhere far from Peter and Cassie, by Natasha’s demand. They follow the perpetrators there, get their hospital room numbers, and enter their rooms still dressed in their blood-spattered superhero suits. Legally, sure, they shouldn’t be going anywhere near these guys, at least not until morning, but Natasha doesn’t care. She needs to know exactly led the charge on the kidnapping—and she doubts it’s the addicts, given their general state of knowledge and wild dependence on drugs.
The first one is a man named Charles Keene. Twenty-eight, Bronx native, long-time PCP addict with multiple warrants for his arrest, reported missing since early April. He gave up his identity pretty much right away and had been begging for drugs since he got to the hospital. “Why did you do it?” asks Sam, before the man can say a word.
The man gives a wild-eyed grin and rattles the handcuffs keeping him contained to the bed.“I’m not telling you a thing! You don’t know me! You don’t know me! I’m a fucking genius, you know… My plan was going so well…”
“And what,” adds Natasha, pacing the foot of the hospital bed with cold eyes, “was that plan, exactly?”
The man’s missing one hand—Natasha remembers the blast well, the one that vaporized Scott lang in a plume of blue light, killing him instantly. Took the guy’s hand, too; it’s currently wrapped in bandages, a stump ending at his wrist. Otherwise, Charles Keene is mostly uninjured. “I’M GOING TO RULE THE WORLD!” he cackles, ignoring the question. He starts giggling to himself, sweat rolling down his forehead. “I’m gonna… I’m gonna…”
So, he’s still high. Perfect.
“What about Peter Parker?” prods Sam Wilson beside her. He’s still got his Falcon glasses on, the red ones. “How did you take him? How’d you know about him?”
Another wild grin. “Peter Parker…” says the man, echoing the boy’s name. “You know, when I killed that fucking traitor, itsy bitsy Parker held onto like… like a baby, like a pathetic little—” He laughs loudly, interrupting himself. “You ever seen brains explode onto someone’s face? Scares the living shit out of ‘em, ha! Literally! THE KID FUCKING PISSED HIMSELF SILLY WHEN I DID IT! I PULLED THE TRIGGER! THAT FUCKING FREAK—”
In a split second, Natasha’s at the man’s bedside, grabbing his hair and slamming his head against the bedrest. “Say one more thing about the kid,” she says, her voice deadly quiet, “and I’ll castrate you like I did the pedophile.”
They can’t get much more out of Charles Keene. He mostly rambles about the people he’s killed and about ‘running the world’ and ‘becoming emperor of the sun’ or whatever else power-hungry junkie murderers think on a daily basis.
So they move onto their next interrogation—the hospitalized Quentin Beck, the one who they caught jerking off back in the bunker. When the brown-haired man sees her, he scowls deeply. “Oh, look,” he says, far too calm. “It’s the ginger bitch who stabbed me.”
“Oh, look,” Nat shoots back, filling her voice with acid, “it’s the sleazeball who gets off to kids being tortured. You know what they do to child molestors in prison, Beck?”
“Peter’s not a child,” he spits, and then, realizing his mistake, backtracks quickly. “I didn’t do anything to anyone.”
“Sure,” she says darkly, watching his rage bubble. “So how’s the wound, then? You lose one ball or two?” She snuck a look at his chart at the nurse’s station—she knows the guy lost a testicle and then some. “Can you even get it up anymore—”
“You bitch!” he shouts. “You think you’re so great, just because you’ve got an Avengers nametag and Stark’s cash up your ass? Huh? All you Avengers are fucking whores! ” He gives her this vicious smirk, and Nat feels a sudden rush of confusion. “You know, I heard Steve Rogers is real good at sucking dick—he tell you that?”
Natasha goes quiet; her face goes cold with fury.
“Yeah,” he says, getting more confident as Nat’s anger rises, “he does this little trick with his tongue. Fucking incredible.” And then, after a moment to let it sink in: “Or so I’ve heard.”
“Careful, Beck,” says Sam Wilson, but the man doesn’t stop talking.
“And he can swallow, too—takes it like a greedy whore, can you believe it? Captain America himself.” He’s grinning now at the redheaded assassin. “So unless you want the whole world to know that their precious Cap likes it up the ass, you’re gonna let me go.”
Nat stares hard at the brown-haired man; her arms remain folded, her posture taut. “Sam, let’s go,” she says. “We’re done here.”
She keeps the recording of their conversation and sends it to the local chief of police; it’s not worth much, given most of it can be classified as hearsay, but it’s something.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 3:38 AM
Natasha arrives at the hospital on a mission.
She finds Steve’s hospital room with ease, knocks lightly on the door, and enters to find Steve laying in the bed with Bucky beside him; they’re holding hands. “Steve,” she says, taking a quick glance to Bucky. It doesn’t look like he knows. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure,” he says, not paying her much attention. He seems tired, but she can tell; there’s something hidden behind his eyes.
She glances between them once more. “It’s about the kidnappers.”
The man clearly isn’t catching her tone because he says, “Tell Bucky. I don’t really care what you do with them.”
Жопа с ручкой. “Steve,” she tries again, filling her voice with some kind of emphasis, with everything that she just heard at the other hospital. At her strange tone, Bucky looks up, his black-painted gaze revealing only slight confusion; her gaze flickers to Bucky and back.
It finally seems to click in Steve’s mind, because he lets go of Bucky’s hand, sitting back. “Oh,” he says, and his whole body stiffens. “Who told you?”
“ He did,” she says quietly.
“Oh.”
Bucky’s looking back and forth between them. “What?” he asks. “What happened?”
Natasha ignores him; “Did you tell the doctor?” she asks.
“Why would I do that?” he says sharply. “He didn’t injure me.”
Now, the words settle in Bucky’s brain, because he looks suddenly to Natasha with clear eyes, his brow hardening. “He…” The Winter Soldier looks at Steve, tries to reach his gaze, and Steve just grips his knees tight and stares at the base of the bed. “One of them assaulted you?”
Steve stiffens again like he’s been struck. “No one assaulted me,” the man says. “He was going after Peter. I just…kept his eyes on me.”
Bucky looks raw.
“What happened?” tries Natasha.
Steve’s head is still turned away from Bucky. “He was gonna do something to Peter. He was… He’d done it earlier, touching him, but this time I wasn’t strong enough to fight him. They’d drugged me, so I… I couldn’t do anything. So I thought… I just… I thought maybe it would stop him.”
Bucky’s voice is liquid-nitrogen cold, so icy it burns her ears. “Maybe what would stop him?”
Steve’s head is in his hands. “If I offered to… to… to give him… to…” He lets out this shaky breath. “...if I…sucked him off.”
The shame in his voice clouds the room.
“What?” asks Bucky, in some kind of restrained fury. “Who?”
Steve can’t bear to look at him. “I don't know his name,” he says miserably.
“Steve,” says Natasha, and the man shakes his head, “that’s assau—”
“No one assaulted me,” he says. “I just… I’m sorry.”
Natasha blinks. “What the hell do you have to be sorry for? He’s the one who assaulted y—”
“I said no one assaulted me!”
She shuts up.
“Look,” he continues, his tone sharp and bitter, “I was in full control of the situation. He never would’ve even thought about it if I hadn’t suggested it. I… I wanted to do it. And then the rest… It was just touching, it wasn’t anything. Really.”
“The rest?” echoes Bucky, choking on the words.
“And I didn’t ask for that part, but I didn’t stop him because I knew—I knew it’d stop him from doing it to Peter. So I… I let it happen. I did. I never said no, I never fought back. I wasn't assaulted.” He rubs the back of his hand across his mouth. “I just—you don’t understand what it was like in there. I was just trying to protect the kid. He was destroying him, and I—so I just kept offering until he—until he took me up on it. And I didn’t—I didn’t mean to cheat on you, Buck, I—” He’s tearing up now, ripples of water shining in his eyes, and he rubs at his face. “It was only one time, I swear—and the other stuff was just—you didn’t see it, you weren’t there, I had to do it, Peter was so scared and I had nothing else…”
“Steve,” she tries again, “no one’s saying—”
Steve turns to Bucky finally and grasps the other man firmly by the arms; Natasha takes a step back, feeling suddenly like she’s intruding on something intimate. “Bucky,” he says, and the tears are coming down his face now, the bitter tone in his voice mellowing into a miserable plea. “I swear. I swear on my life. I—I was just trying to keep him away from the kid, and—I had nothing. Nothing . Nothing but my body to trade and—that’s what I had to do. I was just doing what I had to do.”
The Winter Soldier softens slightly, his hands curling around Steve’s forearms. “I know, Stevie,” he says, “I know.”
Steve Rogers’ face is shining. “Bucky—please—please understand. I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean to hurt you… I just—I was just trying to keep him away from Peter and I—it was all I had , baby, it… It was all I had .”
“I know,” he says, and he’s holding Steve, “it’s okay, I know.”
Steve cries into Bucky’s shoulder. “It was—it was all I had, I couldn’t… It was all I had .”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 4:50 AM
Clint finds an empty conference room and sits in it.
He just wants somewhere quiet to digest what has just happened. That little girl… They’d been torturing her. Torture was too clinical a word. They’d trapped her, beaten her, starved her, kept her away from her family, and frightened her to such a point that she couldn’t recognize a hospital as a safe place.
Nat comes in not long after him, her footsteps near-silent. “Wondered where you’d gone,” she says. “You good?”
No matter his answer, Nat could probably read it off of his stance alone—hunched in a chair with his head in his hands. “Not really,” he says, and she stands in the corner with her arms folded.
The next arrival is Sam Wilson, who’s looking slightly green and wiping at his mouth. He grips the doorway as he enters as though to right himself, and then slumps into a rolling chair on the opposite side of the room. After him comes Rhodes, who passes Clint and Nat to speak to Sam, speaking to him quietly in firm, slow words. Sam nods as he speaks, head bobbing like a kid in a classroom.
And finally there’s Bruce, who grunts as he moves into the corner opposite Nat and folds his arms, mirroring the spy.
Each of them stay where they are, dejected and in shock.
“This is bad,” says Clint after a long period of silence. “This is really, really bad.”
“Yeah,” says Sam Wilson, who hasn’t been able to say much else this entire time.
More silence.
“How could we miss this?” says Rhodes. He’s dressed in a dark military uniform: black camo pants and a black top, and the braces on his legs match. “How—” He looks up, his gaze ice-cold and trained on Nat. “I thought you and Barnes cleaned out all the HYDRA bunkers last year.”
“We did,” she says stiffly, clearly not pleased at the accusation. “They weren’t HYDRA.”
“Then who were they?”
“I don’t think that matters right now,” she shoots back. “All of them are dead or in custody. We can take care of them later.”
“And what about Steve?” asks the man. “And Barnes?”
Nat shakes her head. “I think Steve’s gotta stay for a couple days.” She tries not to think too hard about Steve and that asshole Quentin Beck; if she does, she’s sure Clint will read it right off of her face. “Bucky’s staying with him.”
Terse silence.
“I’ve gotta go check on the girl,” says Clint finally, and Sam Wilson follows him, muttering something about calling his sister.
The rest of them stay behind, heads hung low. A sense of shame seems to wash over the room.
They’ve really messed up.