god stood me up
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 5:47 AM
Secretary Ross is in his office when he hears the news.
The fucking Avengers found them. Broke them all out in one night.
“They gave me one fucking phone call,” spits that scientist Beck over the phone, “so I called you. And you better fix this, Ross, I swear to God—you told me this plan was soundproof. I don’t think being handcuffed to a hospital bed with my dick sliced in half is fucking soundproof! ”
He did. He’d said those exact words, truly. Quentin, he’d said, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Stark and his kid aren’t going anywhere—this plan is soundproof. “Just stay put,” he grunts, “and for fuck’s sake, stop talking to Avengers! Keep your mouth shut! Loose lips, Quentin!”
“ They came to me! ” snarls the man. “Ross, if I’m not out of these goddamn cuffs by the time—”
“Alright, alright, keep your panties on, Quentin” —the other man makes a furious noise of protest— “I’m handling it.”
“Ross—”
“I said, I’m handling it! ”
He slams the phone down on its receiver.
This is a broiling hot mess.
Project Manticore was supposed to be quiet—a little project, off the books, that would get Ross the power and fame that he wanted through rerouted government funding. He was supposed to get an ultra-powerful weapon ghost-designed by Stark, control of the most powerful billionaire in the world, and the respect of the entire United States military.
After it was over, he was gonna kill the boy, stage an accident for Stark, and pay the rest of the addicts to keep quiet—they’d all have been dead within a few years anyway. Ross would’ve gotten what he wanted, easily.
Instead, he’s got a design for a mostly-okay automatic gun, four living witnesses, a dead police officer, and all of his Project Manticore team in prison or dead. If this goes south, he could end up fired. Or in jail.
Unless he can ensure these morons keep their mouths shut.
His reputation’s on the line here—and he’ll do anything to protect his reputation.
He makes a few more phone calls—one to his connections at Oscorp, a multinational law firm based in the city—and another to the jail holding most of the junkie idiots in Project Manticore. There were thirteen of them caught at the bunker: eight of the original addicts he paid, Quentin Beck, and four of the soldiers he sent as reinforcements. The rest were dead—a couple from inter-group violence, but most from overdoses. Not that a couple dope-lovers choking on vomit is his problem. He could care less about their deaths—it’s the mess that he cares about.
So he sends a few lawyers their way, lubes up his alibis, sends his hot new secretary for a couple espressos, and picks up the phone again.
God, there is not a single day on this earth that Tony Stark is not a pain in his ass.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 6:14 AM
Clint learns very quickly that the little Lang girl hates needles.
Hate is too calm a word—Cassie Lang has a conditioned fear response to needles. She can recognize the sound of a syringe filling with liquid, the noise it makes when the rubber cap comes off, everything.
She’s so terrified that when the nurse comes at her with an injection—a mild analgesic, for her pain—she thrashes her entire body, scratching and biting like a wild animal.
“When are her parents coming?” asks the doctor, a pediatrician named Dr. Colt, as his nurse clamps a hand around a bite-mark on his arm and hurries out of the room. The little girl hides in the corner of the room, tucking herself beneath behind the hospital bed and huddling there, shivering.
“Soon,” says Clint, taking a glance at his phone for another call. He contacted the Paxtons hours ago, so they’re probably on a plane or somewhere in serviceless mountains. “They’re coming, I swear.”
Dr. Colt looks conflicted. “Look, Mr—Barton—Hawkeye—sir, if she injures another one of my staff, we’re just going to sedate her—”
From the corner, Cassie starts bawling, crying so hard that her neck lurches forward.
“No,” says Clint stiffly. “Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”
The dark-haired doctor tries a couple more times—even encouraging Clint to pin her down in order to get the injection in her, but he won’t. He can’t imagine how many times those bastards probably pinned her down; he refuses to do it to her, too. Clint understands that he’s just trying to help, but still.
She hasn’t just been throwing tantrums; Cassie’s so wholly terrified that she’ll start screaming—high-pitched and horror-tinged—before sobbing out apologies for imagined wrongs, interactions that haven’t occurred, and names of people Clint has never heard of—interspersed the entire time with shrieks for Peter Parker. The one time that the doctor got close enough to insert the syringe into Cassie’s skinny arm, she went horrifically quiet and wet herself so suddenly that the doctor backed away before she started crying again.
There’s a difference between anxiety and terror—Cassie Lang is experiencing the latter.
She’s been crying so much that her face is swollen. Every word she speaks, every movement she makes—it’s all drenched in petrified confusion, especially once she realized that her father wasn’t at the hospital. Clint can barely get near her without her screaming like he just stabbed her.
They manage, eventually, to tempt her with food and drink: a granola bar and a bottle of soda from the vending machine. This gets her to stop crying; suddenly dumbfounded, she stares at the food until they back away from it, which is when she dives for it, snatches it up, and throws herself back into the corner before devouring each.
Dr. Colt, finally, offers her a liquid sedative—an orange-flavored syrup in a paper cup—and she takes that, too, gulping it down in a couple seconds. When that dose doesn’t seem to calm her, they give her another, and another, until finally she stills, her fear mutating into slow rocking. She clutches the plastic granola-bar wrapper and whispers for Peter.
They manage to get an IV in her this time, and the nurse doses her with another wave of sedatives through it, and at last she stops moving enough that they can get a good look at her injuries, particularly her crushed hand. The worrying thing is that her fear tears through the sedative like a hot knife. Although her body and mind are slow, her fear is still very much present, her eyes bugged wide and focused on the IV in her arm. “You’re okay,” assures Clint, and the little girl holds his arm with loose, sedated fingers. “It doesn’t hurt anymore, right?”
She nods, utter confusion written all over her face. Cassie eventually calms a little bit and tucks herself in the corner of the hospital bed, burying herself in sheets and taking deep, shaking breaths.
“We have ways to help children in hospital settings,” says Dr. Colt, “but never like this. This is New Hampshire, Mr. Barton. We don’t deal with a lot of cases…like this.”
Like what? “Kidnapping?”
The doctor shakes his head. “Torture,” he says.
Clint supposes that’s exactly what this is. Torture. No one looks like Cassie who hasn’t experienced torture. Whatever she’d witnessed in there, Clint could hardly imagine.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 7:01 AM
Tony watches Peter sleep.
The kid finally fell asleep around seven. His sleep is fitful and feverish as the drugs drain from his system.
And he watches. Tony floats between sleep and waking himself—this is the first time in months that he’s spent more than an hour without his sleep-supplement pills, and it’s drawing this smooth, languid sleepiness from him that he hasn’t felt in forever.
Pepper falls asleep in the chair beside him. How could she have been… She's pregnant. She’s been pregnant this whole time. She’s gotta be, what, six, seven months along?
He watches Peter—this boy who, five months ago, would’ve come bounding through the lab with a new idea at his heels and a stupid grin on his face. Guess what, Mr. Stark? he’d always say. God, what he’d do to hear Peter say that again now.
The kid doesn’t wake for a while; nurses flit in and out of the room, exchanging medications and rewrapping bandages. He stirs occasionally, his face twitching, but generally stays unconscious. When the kid finally wakes, Tony watches those brown eyes blink open, bleary and pained, and he squeezes the kid’s arm. “Peter?” he says.
The monitor starts beeping rapidly.
“Peter, hey, buddy, hey…” He tries to get his attention, but the only sign of life is his eyes—open into giant white bulbs of terror, like a pair of flickering lightbulbs, and he scans the room, scans and scans, and there’s no sign that he knows where they are at all. It’s only a moment before he’s moving, his body twisting on top of hospital sheets. He gets one hand up and onto his mouth, and he grabs at his oxygen mask and pulls —the elastic ties snap. “Peter!” His hand flops over the bedrest, limp; the kid’s on so many drugs, hospital and bunker alike, that he can barely hold himself up.
Yet still he tries.
Peter shifts his head and tries to lift it, simultaneously finding the IV in his hand. “Leave it, Peter, that’s helping you…” Sluggish hands find the tube and try to get ahold of it, and Tony pushes his hands away—
It’s the touch that does it. The beeping suddenly intensifies, high-pitched and loud, his heart-rate going wild while his eyes squeeze shut. “Somebody! Hey, I need some help in here!”
In seconds, nurses swarm the kid, pinning him down and dosing him with more sedatives; in only minutes, the kid’s prone body slackens, and he’s asleep again.
This happens two more times.
On the third time, Tony wakes to Peter’s monitor going buck-wild; the beeping erratic and high-pitched. Peter makes noise as he wakes, raspy sounds escaping his bruised throat. As Tony touches his face, trying to calm him down, his whole body goes fraught with tension, suddenly iron-stiff on the bed. He goes so still that his chest doesn’t move, and Tony can tell from the monitors: the kid’s holding his breath.
“Peter,” he tries, and the kid’s eyes are open now, pupils like two black currants, beads of dark swimming in wide-open sclera. “Peter, breathe.”
Tony touches his wrist.
It happens fast—the kid goes straight to panic, air sucking into him in great gulps, and he throws his drugged body over the side of the bed, slipping over before Tony can catch him; he hits the ground hard with a thunk so loud that Pepper startles awake. “Peter!”
Tony limps to the other side of the bed, finding his kid laying crooked on the ground, curling in on himself; as soon as Tony gets too close, he grasps one of the bed-legs and pulls himself underneath with a pained groan. “Pepper, go get someone, please—Peter, listen to me, you’re safe. We got you out, buddy, we got you out.”
He makes a grab for Peter’s leg—maybe he can pull him out from under there—and the kid makes a whimpery sound so utterly raw that Tony immediately lets go, falling backwards onto his tailbone.
Then nurses flood in, dragging a crying Peter out from under the bed and pinning him down on the bed as he thrashes, sticking him with another dose of sedative. And within minutes, he’s asleep again.
After that, he doesn’t awake for a while.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 8:06
Happy comes back eventually with a couple styrofoam cups of hospital coffee and hands one off to him. All three of them sit together with the kid, listening to his monitors beep and hiss.
“I failed him,” says Tony softly, his voice like a puff of air. “I failed him.”
“We all failed him,” says Happy, voice wretched. “And I thought he was at an internship.”
It sounds so stupid now.
Internship, summer camp, moved away.
They all sound so childish, so naive.
“They hurt him every day,” says Tony. His hands tremble badly, enough that the brown liquid in his cup ripples. “Every day I'd work until I passed out, and it still wasn’t good enough. Every single day, Pep.” He looks haunted. “I…I had to watch as they hurt my kid in whatever way they could. Whatever they thought of. Burned him, cut him, beat him, fucking waterboarded him…”
Pepper presses her hand to her mouth.
“It didn’t take long for them to break him,” he says. “He stopped talking back…a few days in. Stopped being Peter. Just begged me to help him. He stopped trying to escape a couple months in. I knew ‘cause they’d—they’d punish him in front of me every time he tried. Take the hammer to him or… Or electrocute him or… Whatever they could come up with.” His gaze looks broken; he swallows, his Adam’s apple shifting below his grayed beard. She’s never seen it that long, that unkempt. “And I tried. I really tried, Pepper. but it was never good enough.” Tony turns that empty gaze on her. “I've never tried so hard before, Pepper. I put everything I had in that fucking thing… And still I couldn’t do it.”
Excusing himself from Peter’s bedside, Happy calls SHIELD next. Coulson picks up the phone a couple rings in. “Hogan,” the director says. “How are you?”
“I didn’t call for your first-class small talk, Coulson. You remember Peter Parker?”
The man chuckles lightly. “Am I supposed to?”
“Look in your goddamn database, Coulson—I’m not kidding around.”
On the other line, buzzing silence. Good. Coulson’s Some typing, and some affirmative beeps. “Spider-man?”
“That’s him.”
“Went off the grid months ago…” More typing. “Hogan, what is this about?”
Happy explains as best he can. Steve Rogers went to find some police officer’s brother in an old HYDRA bunker. They found Ant-Man’s kid and Spider-Man there instead. Now Ant-Man’s dead, his daughter’s inconsolable, and Spider-Man— Peter —has sustained so much damage that the doctors who treat him are fainting in hallways.
“No,” asserts Coulson. “We cleared those HYDRA bunkers—there’s no neo-HYDRA groups left in the entire country, Hogan.”
“Wee…” Happy rubs the back of his neck. “We don’t think it was HYDRA.”
“What?”
“The guys we found in there… The ones running the place? They were all normal. No enhancements, no mutations, nothing. They were just…addicts.”
“Look,” says Coulson on the other line. It sounds like he’s pacing. “This sounds like a pretty…devastating situation, but unfortunately, it’s not my problem. SHIELD doesn’t deal with doesn’t deal with personal crimes.”
“But it’s Peter —”
“I get it,” says the director. “You care about the kid. And I’m sorry about what happened to him. It sounds…difficult. But whoever kidnapped him doesn’t seem like a threat to national security—therefore, not my problem.” Silence on the other line. “I’m sorry.”
Happy supposes now that Charles Keene, Quentin Beck, and the rest of the people who terrorized Peter Parker can’t be taken care of that easily. Not by SHIELD, at least. They’re in the hands of the law now.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 8:29 AM
At last, after two wait-listed flights and three speeding tickets, Maggie and Jim Paxton arrive at a New Hampshire hospital out of breath and frantic.
They’d gotten on the nearest flight without a second thought—no luggage, not a thing in their pockets but their wallets.
Both Maggie and Jim are still dressed in their pajamas—flannel pants, cotton shirts, and crazy hair. “There’s a girl here,” gasps Jim, still out of breath from sprinting through sections of the hospital. Sweat-stains spread under both his arms and down his chest. “Cassie—Cassandra Marie—Paxton-Lang.”
Maggie unfurls a wrinkled missing poster of her daughter and waves it in front of the woman at the front desk. “Have you seen her? Have you?”
“We got a call from the local police station—they said they had our daughter—”
Unbearably calm, the woman picks up the phone and dials, muttering something about ‘Barton’ and ‘patient’ followed by unintelligible medical jargon. Within seconds, there’s a pair of scrub-clothed nurses ushering them down a hallway, around a corner, up five floors on the elevator, and down another hallway, until they reach a closed door.
“Mr. and Mrs. Paxton,” says one of the nurses, one with scruffy brown hair, “I should warn you, your daughter… She’s been through a lot. She’s been pretty skittish since she arrived; we had to give her a couple rounds of sedation to calm her down. Just…go slow, okay?”
She opens the door, and inside is her little girl.
Maggie has imagined this moment millions of times. Her little Cassie sitting in a police station with a blanket over her shoulders as Maggie holds her. Cassie sleeping in a hospital bed as Maggie kisses her forehead. Her girl spotting her from the back of an ambulance and running to her arms with a squeal.
She didn’t expect…nothing.
Cassie is sitting cross-legged on the bed, an IV fed into one arm, hugging her arms around herself. She’s covered in dirt and old bloodstains, and her head’s shaved raggedly over her white skull, and she’s staring at them.
There’s a man beside her in the chair, talking quietly with her as she stares emptily at the couple. In the corner, a doctor taps on a tablet and checks on her IV bag. She doesn’t even move, she just trembles a little and hugs her knees with one arm; the other is trapped in a dirty cast and bound in a medical sling. And still, she stares, like this isn’t the first time she’s seen her family in nearly twenty weeks. Her chest is going up and down, and she’s breathing in small, shallow gasps, like she’s scared.
Oh, god, she’s scared.
This becomes doubly real, the pure fear on her daughter’s face wringing Maggie’s heart dry. Go slow, she remembers, although Maggie’s hardly keeping herself from lunging at the bed with open arms. “Cassie,” she whispers, and she’s already crying. “Oh, my Cassie…”
Her girl just seems rattled as Maggie approaches her, eyes scanning her face. “Mommy?” she says, in a voice so quiet it’s barely comprehensible. Then she goes back to breathing hard, in more teary little gasps, glancing from the man beside her to Maggie and ducking both their eyelines.
“Yes, baby, it’s me…” She comes to the bed, aching to hold her daughter, drinking in every bit of her—god, they hurt her. Fading yellow bruises are visible at the edge of her hairline. She’s got scars lining one arm; the other one is in that sling. “Oh, baby, who hurt you?” She outstretches her hand to Cassie, and this time she doesn’t flinch. She touches her calf, and then her shoulder, and then envelopes her long-lost daughter in a gentle hug. “Oh, Cassie…”
Her girl’s crying then, dipping her head into Maggie’s shoulder. “Mommy,” she whispers.
It’s not long before Maggie’s got her calm enough that Cassie’s breathing normally, tucked into her mother’s arms, and falling almost immediately asleep on her shoulder. “She’s been fighting the sedative all night,” says Dr. Colt, a man with black curly hair, as Jim kisses Cassie’s head. “I can’t believe you managed that so quickly.”
Beside her, Jim finally addresses the man in the chair—one who’s dressed in a flannel and jeans—and sizing him up. “Alright—who the hell are you?” he says, stabbing his finger into the other man’s chest.
A finger doesn’t seem to faze the man. He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes—it comes off more like a tired grimace. “I'm Hawkeye,” he says. “Clint Barton? I’m the one who found her. Brought her here.”
“Hawkeye,” echoes Jim, taking a step back; his sudden aggression diminishes a little. “Oh. Thank you. Thank you.”
Barton shakes his head. “I'm just glad she’s okay. I got three kids of my own—can’t imagine if this happened to them.” He shakes Jim's hand. “If you need anything, just call.”
With Cassie comfortable and asleep in her mother’s arms, the doctors are finally able to give her a full workup. The only obvious injuries are her feet from all that running, her shattered hand, and her wrecked scalp. They get a couple scans while she’s sleeping—x-ray and a couple others.
Her little girl’s so thin, like a pencil, and it’s all Maggie can do not to order takeout and feed her until her belly is full. “Yeah,” says one of the nurses, when she mentions it. “She lost about thirty percent of her body weight. She’s gonna need some time to get back to her original weight.” She explains that they’re feeding her through the IV, but they have to be careful not to flood her body with too much nutrients. “Slow and steady. Recovery doesn’t happen overnight.”
Eventually, they get her settled back in the hospital bed—but she starts to wake after a bit, so Maggie lies in the bed with Cassie and holds her so that she’ll go back to sleep. She’s never leaving her girl again—she’s never letting Cassie out of her sight again. She has her back—has her safe—which is a miracle in and of itself. Maggie’s gonna take her home and… Give her anything she could ever want. Toys. Food. Late-night cuddles. Whatever she needs, it’s hers.
“Your daughter had the most advanced case of lice infestation I’d ever seen,” says the doctor, as one of the nurses listens to her lungs. “It seems like someone took a dull blade, some kind of edge, maybe, and sawed her hair off to try to get rid of the lice. But” —he points to some shallow lacerations on her head— “it left her with some cuts on her head that the lice infected. That’s why she’s got a bit of a fever. Unusual case, but treatable. So we’re going to remove the rest of her hair, treat her scalp, and manually remove any lice from the cuts on her head.”
The procedure is quick, performed by an olive-skinned nurse who hums softly to Cassie the entire time.
“I’m a little worried about her lungs, too—she’s got a moderate respiratory infection, but we’ll see over the next couple days if she responds well to medication.” The doctor smiles at Cassie, waves his hand slowly. “Hey, Cassie—can you tell me real quick how much your chest hurts, one to ten?”
Cassie looks, a little fearful, up at Maggie, and she squeezes her daughter’s uninjured hand. “It’s not—” She cuts herself off, eyes watery, and grasps her mother’s hand tightly. “It doesn’t count.”
Something cold worms its way into Maggie Paxton’s chest. It doesn’t count. “What?” Her daughter is quiet then, shoving her face into Maggie’s chest to hide from the prying eyes. “Baby, what do you mean?”
Cassie just shakes her head. “Where’s Peter?”
“Who?”
More head shaking.
“Cassie.” She’d ask Barton, but he’s gone, visiting someone else in the hospital—an Avenger who was injured, maybe. Maybe ‘Peter’ was one of her captors. “Did Peter… Did Peter hurt you?”
Her confusion is palpable. Cassie presses her bandaged scalp into Maggie’s chest and sobs quietly into her shirt, dampening the fabric, as though trying to bury herself within her.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 11:52 AM
Peter dreams.
He dreams so vividly and viciously that he can’t tell what’s up and what’s down, if he’s taking seawater or oxygen into his lungs.
He dreams of hands—of a knuckled pressure in his throat, of a red-blooded panic liquifying him.
He dreams of Skip. Of Beck. Of Charlie.
He dreams of Dr. Skivorski, of antiseptic-smelling fabric and a warm touch on aching skin. Of Cassie, with her scraggly, half-shaved head.
Peter dreams of Tony, of a shaggy beard and sad eyes. Of Pepper, with a swollen belly and longer hair.
He's trapped in sleep, a cell of shallow breaths and paralyzed limbs, and he finds himself screaming into the void, hurtling through oily blackness.
Is he still dreaming?
He finds himself taking breaths of bitter, artificial air; he drowns in it, choking, suffocating, and there’s hands on him. Swathes of voices, thick and loud. Fingers and thumbs and he doesn’t want it! He doesn’t want it, Beck, please, please, not in front of Cassie, please he can’t take it anymore— he can’t take it anymore— please, please, please—
He thinks of Cassie, of her hollow cheeks and sallow skin.
He thinks of Mr. Stark.
Tony.
Tony.
Tony.
Darkness chews, chews again, and swallows him whole.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 1:16 PM
They find move Steve to a new room for the rape kit.
They call it something different—something with a nice, professional name—but he’s not a stupid man. He knows what’s happening. Bucky comes with him, and he holds his hand as he sits.
Steve knows he should do this. Any evidence that the brown-haired man left on him— Beck, Nat told him—could be used to press charges against him. Especially if they don’t find anything on Peter… It’ll help any potential case.
But still he feels his skin crawl as he thinks about it.
The physician who enters is not a doctor, but a registered nurse, so she introduces herself as Isabel, a youngish woman with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes. “Hey, there,” she says. “Steve, right?”
This woman saying his name, first and last, out loud is suddenly jarring; what the hell is he doing sitting on this paper-lined cot, waiting for her to ask about an offense he willingly committed? “Yeah,” he says instead.
They ask him questions first.
Specifics, too. About anything that could’ve possibly happened, and Steve, tiredly, tells the truth.
They ask him about anal sex and he says no so aggressively that the nurse startles. “He didn’t do that,” he said. “He didn’t, uh, rape me.” Steve has such infuriating difficulty saying the word out loud; he mentally kicks himself. “I just… I just gave him a blowjob.”
The woman stills; she’s holding her clipboard with nail-bitten fingers. “Sir,” Isabel says softly, sounding a bit like an old television commercial, the static-voiced ones that he can fall asleep to. “In this state, rape is anything involving sexual penetration without consent. That includes oral sex.”
Why is she not understanding this? “No—no, listen. The oral” —he finds himself swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing— “um, sex wasn’t like that. It was just…the touching…that wasn’t…consensual.”
Bucky’s grip suddenly tightens around his hand. “Stevie,” he says, “None of that was consensual.”
He shakes his head. “No—I offered. I knew what I was doing. He didn’t even look at me before then.”
Bucky's mouth twists. “Steve, I’m not a lawyer, but… This man drugged you enough to kill five people, beat you, threatened your life, shot you twice, and kept you locked in a cell. None of those things imply consent. None of them.”
Technically, the door wasn’t locked when the brown-haired man— Beck —was inside. He just couldn’t…leave. That would’ve gotten him shot in the back.
Steve thinks suddenly of the cold metal muzzle of the gun against his back, and he finds air tangled in his chest.
Across from Bucky, the examiner nods a little. “Consent under duress isn’t consent, Mr. Rogers.”
“I told him yes,” he explains, because clearly they don’t understand. “I begged him to—“
“—instead of Peter, right?” finishes Bucky, his eyes tracing Steve’s bruised-purple face. “Stevie, that’s not consent. That’s a trade. That’s coercion, baby.”
He swallows. Oh, Steve thinks. “Still. Kinda hard to make Captain America do something he doesn’t wanna do.”
They go over a few more questions about the details of what happened. When they’re done, Isabel explains what she’s there to do—and then she asks, first and foremost, if he wants Bucky to leave the room for the physical exam. “Some people are more comfortable with a loved one present,” she says, “but some would rather be alone. It’s okay either way.”
Steve ducks his head, feeling a stone in his throat grow; Bucky squeezes his hand lightly. “I can go, Stevie,” he says, brushing his thumb over his knuckles. “I don’t mind.”
He doesn’t want Bucky to watch him do this. To willingly confess, to give physical evidence of what he did… He can’t bring himself to say it out loud: I don’t want you to see this. He just swallows and looks away, staring down at the linoleum floor-tiles.
Bucky seems to catch his meaning. “It’s alright,” he says, letting go of Steve’s hand and pulling on his jacket. “I’ll go get a cup of coffee. You want something?” Steve shakes his head. “Okay.” Bucky touches Steve’s wrist once, letting his fingers linger there before finally getting up, shoving his hands in his pockets, and swiftly exiting.
Then, at last, he’s alone with the woman— Isabel —and her assistant.
She has Steve change into a hospital gown, and she and her assistant pack his clothes—of which he only has his sweatpants and boxers—into ziplock bags.
They do photographs first. The easy ones come first: the wounds on his head, the gunshot wounds in his shoulder, the boot-shaped bruise in his back. Little nail-lines on the back of his neck.
He tries not to think about it.
“Hey, Steve,” says Isabel gently. “We doing okay so far?”
He nods and blinks at the ceiling.
“Remember we can stop at any time, okay? We can skip steps or take breaks or do whatever you want. This is all your choice.”
He doesn’t want to stop this; he wants to get it over with.
They move on to the hard part; she asks him to disrobe, and he does, shucking the hospital gown and feeling entirely like a stuck pig. They do photos from there, and there are more scratches on him, ones he doesn’t remember getting. Then they move onto the more physical part: swabbing for evidence. They do his mouth first, which isn’t hard at all, and then…
Steve can feel, suddenly, the brown-haired man’s fingernails on his skin, and he hears the man’s voice like an echo haunting his skull: Beg for it. Beg for it. All of a sudden he’s jerking away from the woman’s gloved hands and sitting up, hospital fabric twisted over him, and he holds it to his chest like he’s not naked everywhere else.
He can’t breathe.
There’s fabric over him: white hospital cloth. A blanket, maybe. He draws it over himself so tightly and so suddenly that it rips cleanly down the center, to which the woman just drapes another one over him. She’s talking to him, Steve realizes, asking him questions. She must’ve stopped the exam. Evidence collection. Whatever she was doing.
“Can you…” he manages, gathering himself, his mind swarmed by sudden shame. “Can you get Bucky?”
Isabel nods and leaves shortly.
Steve’s not alone for long; Bucky’s there in mere seconds, smelling slightly of coffee and hair dye. He sits next to him on the floor, adjusting the blanket around Steve, and his closeness eases the venomous viper coiled in Steve’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out, hunched over with the hospital blanket clutched around him; he feels stupid, like a little kid who refuses to get in the bathtub. “I’m so sorry I… I cheated on you…”
“You didn’t,” says the other man, voice gruff and insistent, one arm around his shoulders. Steve feels small again—like before the war, when they used to sleep in each other’s beds. “You didn’t. You didn’t. You protected that kid. I’m proud of you, Stevie. Really fucking proud.”
Steve cries, nodding, and, for once, he doesn’t fight him on it. It’s not usually this way around: Steve asking Bucky for comfort instead of the other way around. He tips his head onto Bucky’s shoulder and lets out this tired, tired sob.
And when he’s finally ready, they do the rest.
“Don’t look, Buck,” whispers Steve, flat on his back on the exam table. Even though Bucky’s seen him naked a thousand times before, somehow this time feels different.
“I won’t,” he says, and then he’s got his eyes closed, both hands still clasped around Steve’s. “Promise.”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 4:48 PM
Cassie wants Peter.
Mommy’s talking to the man from the cabin; they’re whispering about Daddy, but Cassie isn’t listening. She’s much too frightened to listen.
She remembers places like this. She remembers that these are called hospitals, and she remembers that the people in white coats are called doctors. Cassie remembers that she used to come to places like this every year, go into a colorful room and sit on the table. Mommy called them… Oh. She can’t remember what they’re called. She would come and sit on the paper-lined table and get shots.
Shots.
Cassie starts to tremble at the thought of a needle, and Mommy hugs her tight. Right. Mommy’s here. She’s here, and she promised Cassie that no one was going to take her away again.
But Cassie’s not sure.
There’s only one person she can trust in the whole entire world, and that’s Peter. Peter tells her what’s going to hurt and what doesn’t. He tells her when to hide under the bed and when not to. He tells her when Charlie’s coming and when Beck’s visiting. He tells her when to talk and when to be quiet.
Peter keeps her safe.
But he’s not here.
“Mommy?” she whispers, because she’s not sure where Charlie and the others are.
Mommy’s face is wet and shiny, like Peter’s when he comes back from his time outside. “Yes, baby?” she says, in her sad-crackly voice.
She drops her voice really, really low. She knows she can’t be loud, and she doesn’t want Charlie to come in and hurt her for making too much noise. “Where’s Peter?”
Mommy blinks at her, sniffling. “Who’s Peter?”
Cassie doesn’t say anything. She feels like saying his name out loud might make Charlie come running, and she can’t… She can’t… She remembers how Charlie grabbed the police lady, fisting his hammer, and slammed it into her face like he was playing whack-a-mole. He could do that to her for running away. He always punishes them for doing something bad.
Maybe that's where Peter is—maybe Charlie got him. Maybe Charlie is punishing him for running away, and she's next.
Shaking again, she hugs her mommy tightly and pretends she’s Peter.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24 — 9:43 PM
Peter’s sitting up.
Pepper’s gone to fill out more forms, so Tony’s the only one in the hospital room when the kid wakes.
He’s not terrified or thrashing this time, which Tony counts as a win, but he’s acting strange. He seems confused, blinking lethargically, as though seeing the world through a thick fog. Delirious, he sways, his eyes grazing the room and entirely passing over Tony.
“Peter?” he whispers.
The kid’s head sways from side to side; Tony has the unbearable urge to throw his arms behind Peter in case he falls too hard, but he’s afraid that any movement will set him off to another round of panicked flailing.
What’s happening?
“Peter,” he tries again. “You with me?”
His eyes are glassy and empty; his gaze drifts over the room like a raft on open water. His head kind of tilts back, dipping like a bowling ball on his spine, and he forces it upright, scanning the room once more. This time, his gaze hits Tony.
And it stays.
He just keeps staring at him. And staring. And staring.
Tony’s never cherished eye contact so much in his life. “Hey, buddy… It’s me. It’s” —his voice cracks, and he can feel tears well behind his eyes— “Mr. Stark. You hear me?”
Peter’s eyelids drift closed, his head sloping to the left, and then the kid’s eyes gaze tiredly at him. God, this isn’t the Peter he knew. He’s… He’s… He’s not pulling away, but there’s only a scrap of recognition in those brown eyes. For the first time, he’s recognizing at least some sense of safety. “You’re doing so good, Peter. So good. You’re gonna pull through. You’re strong, okay? You’re the strongest kid I know.”
The kid blinks, his lashes dull and slow, breathing in strange huffs through his chapped lips. His fingers twitch at his side, and drift upwards to touch his stomach, his fingers splayed loosely over his abdomen.
He must be in pain. “Does something hurt, buddy?” Tony’s heart hammers, a set of crash cymbals in his ribcage. Recognize me, he wants to beg. I’m right here, Peter, I’m finally here. Recognize me, buddy.
Peter stares at him, his bloodshot eyes becoming suddenly intent with partial lucidity, his brow tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing. He nods, slowly, sluggishly, like he’s not sure what he’s saying, like he’s afraid of the motion itself.
He’s communicating. He’s communicating.
Tony can’t help the tears that come. “Oh, buddy… We can get you more—more pain meds, whatever you need…”
Peter’s eyes don’t leave him. One arm tightens around his abdomen, and then the monitors start going off, insane beeping filling the small hospital room. Tony breaks the kid’s gaze to read his monitor; his blood pressure—it’s dropped to almost nothing.
Yet Peter’s sitting still like nothing’s happened. All the while, his eyes are trained on Tony’s. He’s still nodding, his pale chin dipping. “Peter?” he asks again. “You with me, kid?” His eyes flutter closed again—for a moment, the whites of his eyes are the only part visible.
And then Peter drops like a stone; at the same time, his monitors burst into a symphony of troubling alarms.
An alert goes over the PA system: CODE BLUE IN ROOM 188. ALL AVAILABLE PERSONNEL. CODE BLUE IN ROOM 188. ALL AVAILABLE PERSONNEL.
Tony fumbles for a pulse at the kid’s neck, the bruises there now near-black. “Peter! Come on, Peter, come on…”
Nurses and doctors are there with a cart before he can even find a heartbeat, pulling him bodily from the hospital bed and pushing him out the door. He can hear them working on him: “He’s in cardiac arrest—charge to two hundred!”
Another voice: “ Clear!”
A jolt, like the bed shaking, and then again: “Charge to three hundred!”
“ Clear!”
They take Peter to the ICU afterwards.
Peter’s doctor—that nice woman, Dr. Jackson—takes them to a conference room while Peter recovers. “What happened to him?” asks Pepper. “I thought he was stable.”
The doctor folds her hands on top of each other, clearing her throat. “Peter went into cardiac arrest as a result of a condition called refeeding syndrome—it’s a life-threatening condition that develops when someone who is severely malnourished receives healthy amounts of nutrition for the first time.”
“I don’t understand,” says Pepper. “I thought we wanted to feed him.”
“Yes and no,” says the doctor. “You see, when someone is malnourished, especially over a long period of time, their body makes up for its missing nutrients—overcompensates—in order to keep them alive. So his body adapted to the low nutrition and made up for any lacking nutrients on its own. Which means that when we gave him near-normal amounts of nutrition to strengthen him, his body became overwhelmed, and now his electrolyte levels became way higher than normal—dangerously high. Levels like that” —she gestures vaguely in the direction of Peter’s room— “can lead to problems with the brain, kidney, heart… And led to his cardiac arrest.”
Brain. “That’s why he was acting like that?”
Tony had described it to her—his focused gaze, his confused nodding, his unresponsiveness.
Dr. Jackson nods. “Confusion is a common side effect. So we’re gonna take it a little slower, monitor his electrolytes carefully as he gets better.”
“And what about the leg?” asks Pepper. “You’re not…doing anything about that?”
“Not yet,” she says, pulling up an X-ray of the kid’s brutalized leg. “For now, we’re just gonna keep the limb stable. There’s no viable way to recover that knee into a viable joint. We can replace the knee with an artificial joint—an arthroplasty and try to recover the tibia with something solid to connect it to. Not now, but… When he’s healthy enough. Unless it causes any problems, we should be fine. And for now, he just needs rest and care.”
“And psychologically?” offers Pepper. “When do you think he’ll, you know…”
“...wake up?” finishes Dr. Jackson. “I’m not trained in psychiatry, Ms. Potts. Just give him time. Let’s let his mind and his body relax. There’s no time limit on rest.”
They’re not allowed in the ICU this late in the day.
So Pepper and Tony end up in the waiting area with the rest of the Avengers. Happy’s on the phone, pacing back and forth, and Clint and Natasha are talking in hushed tones by the sliding doors. Steve and Bucky are sitting side by side in waiting-room chairs, fingers interlaced, Steve’s head resting.
Pepper didn’t realize they were that…close. It makes sense, now that she’s thinking about it. How Steve became a war criminal just to protect Bucky from prison. How insistent Bucky was that Steve didn’t enter the bunkers. How physically affectionate they were with each other. It’s a bit of a surprise, but nothing compared to the rest of the day, so she nods politely in their direction.
Pepper and Tony settle near the rest of their friends—friends? Is that what they all are?—exhausted and filled with a similar sense of shell-shocked narcosis.
“Thought he’d been admitted,” says Pepper to Bucky. The man still has remnants of blank dye all over his face. “Did he get discharged already?”
Steve doesn’t lift his head from Bucky’s shoulder; he might be asleep. “Yeah,” says Bucky for him, “super-healing kicked in, so he’s free to go. He just wanted to stay to check on Peter.” He nudges the blonde, who stirs, blinking wearily. Butterfly stitches line the supersoldier’s face, and a thin line of sutures stretch from his eyebrow, down his nose, to the edge of his cheekbone. He’s shirtless, his shoulder wrapped in white strips that extend across his chest, and his arm is in a sling, probably to keep his shoulder stable. His opposite thumb is trapped in a brace that extends down his wrist. The bruising on his face is the worst part—purple and black and green, quickly morphing in color via his super-healing. Steve rasps, “Peter woken up yet?”
A close-mouthed grimace from Pepper; Tony remains quiet. “Yeah.”
“Was he…” the man starts.
Pepper shakes her head. “He was…anxious when he woke up.”
“Anxious?” repeats Tony, suddenly looking unhinged. “ Anxious? He threw himself off the bed, Pepper. He’s terrified.” Pepper presses her mouth into a line.
Steve looks impossibly tired. “He was like that in there, too,” he says.
“He hasn’t even spoken,” adds Tony, pulling sharply at his hair. “He… He…”
Pepper places a hand on his back, which seems to calm him.
“It’s probably a lot for him,” says Rhodey, stepping forth and joining the conversation. “He spent months in that place—learning how to survive in there, learning that no one was coming for him. And all of a sudden he’s faced with an entirely new environment… A change that big would be a lot for anyone, let alone someone who has endured as much as Peter has.”
“He was better when I met him,” adds Steve quietly. “I mean, he wasn’t picture-perfect, but he was lucid, at least. He was in a shit-ton of pain and acting wild, but he was…aware of his surroundings. He barely talked, and if it did it was mostly to tell me to fuck off, but at least he was coherent. But then…”
“Then what?”
Steve winces. “We… We tried to escape. Me and the police officer—we broke him and the little girl out, and there was this other guy, too. A doctor. Trapped in there with the kids. We made a run for it—some guy killed the officer, he” —he gestures vaguely, with a sour expression— “smashed her head open with a hammer, but it gave us time to escape. And we…” He shakes his head. “We split up, me and the doctor, each took a kid with us. I took the girl, he took Peter—this guy was the only one Peter could trust, honestly. We thought our odds would be better that way.” A pained sigh. “And when we got back, Peter and me…” His jaw tenses. “He was rocking, and not talking or responding to anything, not really. And there was blood all over him. Like, not his. And little… Little bits of, like, meat.”
“You think…” starts Pepper, feeling her mouth go dry.
Steve nods; his butterfly stitches strain. “I think someone killed the doctor in front of him.”
From beside him, Natasha nods with her arms folded. “We talked to the guy who was running the thing—Charles Keene? He said the same thing.”
“Which part?” asks Sam.
A look of distaste, like she’s just eaten something bitter. “That he shot the doctor while he was carrying Peter—and Peter held onto his corpse.”
“He was in shock,” says Rhodey, understanding. “No wonder he’s been so messed up. That’s enough to rattle anybody.”
The waiting room fills with silence. They’re lucky it’s late, and this hospital is generally empty, because this conversation is not for young ears.
“And how’s the girl?” Pepper asks Clint. “The one you found at the cabin?”
Clint shrugs, both hands in his pockets. His eyelids droop as though he's been up all night; maybe he has been. “Her parents came for her. Hospital’s keeping her overnight. She’ll survive, but… She’s pretty freaked.”
“She was in there for a while,” says Sam. He still has those red-tinted glasses on. Pepper thinks it might be to mask the upset in his gaze rather than protect his eyes.
The red-haired assassin stands across from him, and she nods. Natasha's hair is in braids now, dozens of them, like the kind middle-schoolers do at sleepovers. “As long as Peter,” she adds.
Steve shifts in his seat; he looks beaten, more so than any fight Pepper had ever seen him in. “I spent less than ten hours with those people,” says Steve, sounding more like a horror film star than the guy who records public service announcements for middle schoolers, “and I feel like they destroyed me.”
Everyone looks up; they’ve never heard Steve Rogers sound quite so grim.
He continues, in that same despondent tone, “Peter and the girl, they were in there for almost five months and they… They’re just kids.”
He was right. They were just kids.
And alone, they’d endured more than Pepper could ever dream of.