Chapter 2
2.
As a month prior, they crash. Hard. Instead of the remnants of their loved ones dispersing into the wind, it’s shrapnel and loose birch leaves, dehydrated enough to crinkle and die at first contact. Dead leaf dust and dirt cling to Tony’s eyelashes. He blinks, rubs them away, and glances around, fearing the worst.
The bodies surrounding him remain still. Steve being the nearest, his face buried in the dirt. His mouth is shut. His eyes don’t even flutter. Tony rolls onto his side and dry heaves. The fog suffocates him. He shakes his head a couple of times, willing away the nightmarish image of death from his memory.
He blinks, and Steve’s in his face, mouthing imperceptibly quick. Alive, dirty but alive. His blue eyes squint and he snaps in front of Tony’s nose. Over his shoulder, the first stirrings amongst the heap occur.
“Come again?” Tony says, breathless.
“Can you stand?” Steve asks. Tony nods; Rogers, for some reason, intreprets this as a no and attempts to help Tony to his feet He waves him off and wobbles into an upright position on his own, albeit as successfully as a drunken toddler taking their first steps. His ankle throbs in protest, and his balance isn’t great. He grunts as he limps away. The childishly knowing half-frown-half-thin-line Steve’s mouth forms when his lips fold in makes him want to deck him in the face. Tony steps away from the wreckage.
The first person Tony comes across is Bruce, whose hair is entirely greyish-brown now from the dirt. His suit is torn at the knees.
“Is everyone okay?” Bruce shouts. A fresh bruise begins to blossom on his right cheekbone, red and purple wine on a silk bed sheet. His voice is rough, perhaps from screaming so loud. He leans on his forearm and rubs his eye with one hand.
Thor stands beside him. Physically, he’s steady, but his golden-brown eye has popped out of the socket and left an empty hole in its place. The remaining eye glows up at the cloud, ignoring the tug on his boot from one Rocket. The sky crackles, and he leaps out of sight.
Clint and Nat stand next - equal parts holding each other up while their balance returns to equilibrium. Natasha’s hair sticks to the back of her neck in wet, be it by sweat or by blood, clumps; Clint’s face almost appears to be covered in war paint. He’s the most banged up of them all, half-crimson and purple, and not because of the costume he used to sport.
Then there’s Rhodey: his smart-legs automatically adjust his steps, so he walks without stumbling, but his face is tight and searching. Oddly, Lang seems the least troubled by the intense vertical drop. He rises and rubs the back of his head.
The last up is Nebula. Her mechanical arm is torn midway at the forearm, wires hanging like severed blood vessels and sparking at random intervals. Rhodes reaches for her shoulder and elbow as she passes, but she shrugs him off in favor of surveying the crash site. Nebula’s elbow - singular - deep in twisted safety pod pieces, searching for her hand, and finding nothing but useless scrap.
The pod landed just off a cracked two-way road. The cement that isn’t broken by growing flora is covered by graffiti in various states of detail and color. Some tags have to be as fresh, maybe a week old. ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST extends from shoulder to shoulder in bold, red paint. Cartoonishly, there’s an outline of a white skull about a foot above the D. Most of the street art is otherwise less depressing - various names and quotes, pictures of faces and silhouettes worn away over the years.
A quarter of a mile away, Tony spies the smoking hunk of aircraft and Thor carelessly tossing debris out of his path until he yanks his axe from the rubble. The crash of metal pops the hearing right back into Tony’s ears.
“Shit,” Tony breathes, flinching. Thor glances back to the entourage and lifts another item from the ground. The disk spins right for Tony’s face. Steve catches it midair and dusts off the imperfections.
“You could say that again,” Rocket grumbles. He sends a pebble skittering over the graffiti with his foot. He cups his hands around his mouth and yells. “Thor, get back here!”
The god jogs back, several yards between each step. He barely meets Tony’s eyes as he mumbles, “sorry.”
“Since no one answered, I’m just going to assume you’re all hurt or dead,” Bruce sighs while still scrubbing at his face. He blinks and squints ahead. He spots the wreckage half a second later. “Crap.”
“How far are we from the target? Cause I don’t wanna walk the rest of the way,” Rocket asks. Nebula loudly releases her hold on one of the larger pieces from the pod. Tony’s eyes drop to his wrist; a crack splits the steady blue line tracking the rhythm of his heart and the rest of the display. He licks his thumb and rubs a smudge of dirt from the glass.
“It’s, uh, a mile that way,” Tony points at the now flaming vehicle. Rocket groans. “Bad news -”
“That was the good news ?”
“-There aren’t any towns in any direction for at least twenty miles, and closest ones are probably abandoned by now.”
“So what do we do?” Clint asks. Natasha lowers him on the side of the road and squats. She holds his chin and inspects his wounds: most of the damage on his face are cuts and some bruising above his brow. He won’t meet her eyes.
“I see no reason for us to not continue our mission,” Thor says pragmatically. His jaw is strung tight, fists at his side. Stormbreaker digs a trembling line in the stone as he marches forward. “Thanos is close.”
“We are not in any condition to face Thanos,” Bruce says, rounding on the god. He holds his hand out against his chest. Thor stops.
“If we can stand, we can fight ,” Thor protests.
“Raise your hand if you’re hurt.” Bruce turns to the rest of the team.
Steve forcibly raises Tony’s wrist since the man himself lets both dangle at his waist. Tony scowls at him and yanks it out of his grasp, but leaves it up. Nebula reluctantly lifts her nub. Clint holds up two pink fingers, forehead propped on his other hand.
“Now put your hand down if you want to turn back,” Thor counters. None fall.
“Nobody wants to back off, Thor. This-this is tantamount to suicide,” Bruce replies. “It’s a trap. I can feel it. Something’s waiting for us there.”
“Yes. Thanos.”
“I think we should stick to the original plan,” Steve says. “We’re stranded with no way to get home. What do we have to lose?”
“Well, not no way home. The failsafe should’ve kicked in when the ship went down. Pepper’ll send reinforcements to pick us up in 48 hours,” Tony chimes in.
“Thank you, Tony,” Bruce says with a dramatic wave.
“Cowards.”
“Stop bickering,” Nebula pinches her nose and rises from the grass. “If you’re so opposed to battle, we’ll split into groups. Some of us can wait for help, the rest will investigate the signal.”
“Great plan, Bluebell,” Tony praises.
“You two,” she points at Natasha and Clint, “should stay. You won’t bode well against my father, especially in your condition. You,” her finger lands on Rhodes, “you aren’t a terrible tactician. You’ll be useful.”
“Who died and made you leader?” Rocket scoffs.
“Gamora. Quill.” Rocket backs off.
“Tony and I can stay here,” Bruce volunteers. “Maybe we can find your hand.”
“I’ll make you a better one when we get home,” Tony offers. Her lips twitch at the corners. She mumbles a soft thank you under her breath, just for his ears.
“Rocket, will you stay?” Nebula asks. A pointless question, as he’s already copying down the coordinates from Tony onto the communicator and reattaching it to his belt. She sighs. “Of course not.”
After a last once over and some scrappy patchwork mechanically from Tony and medically from Natasha and Bruce, the team, save for Natasha, Clint, Tony, and Bruce, gathers in a circle.
“If everyone’s good to go…” Steve looks around. Three pairs of eyes meet his, no signs of hesitation within them. “Alright.”
“If anything happens, you give us a call. Got it?” Tony shouts after Nebula. She nods.
Once their out of sight, Tony climbs back into what used to be the pod and begins cracking a section of the floor off with a piece of scrap he found in the road and tossing it to the street like useless Christmas wrapping paper, leaving the delicate machinery exposed. The air in the small compartment is stifling. Tony wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. The sleeves of his skin-tight black running suit are already rolled to his elbows, so he pulls the top off and ties it around his waist. He peels back the bundle of primary colored wires and carefully removes a small, glowing blue cylinder.
Meanwhile, Bruce hovers just outside, occasionally handing Tony tools from his emergency toolbox. He watches in mild curiosity, until Tony’s watch beeps twice in succession when he dusts his pants off and walks to Tony’s side. Tony twists the face around, his bpm spiking in the 160s.
“Sit with me for a sec, Tony,” Bruce pats the ground beside him.
Clint keeps his head low, between his knees, to counter the tinny shrieks deafening his left ear. He tries to pick out a clump of wax with his pinky in a desperate attempt to make some kind of difference, but it doesn’t, it can’t, his mind oscillates between too loud to think and too quiet to focus. He hasn’t left the shoulder of the road since sitting down.
Natasha leaves his side while the ebb and pull occupies his attention. She approaches Tony first.
“What’s that?”
“Vibranium battery,” Tony tosses it a couple inches in the air and catches it. “Plan D.”
“What happened to B and C?”
“A is Nebula’s plan plus Pep’s rescue team, B is Thor whipping up a storm in a fit of rage that's big enough to take out the East Coast and killing all of us including Thanos, C is hunkering down in the rubble over there and waiting Thanos out after he kills all our friends, D is a vibranium-fueled bomb.”
“I’m betting on B,” Clint says, his voice strained. “Are your guys’ ears still ringing? ‘Cause mine are.”
“Just a little,” Tony shrugs.
“My ear’s totally blown out.”
“That’s not great,” Bruce says. He squats beside the man and checks for obvious signs of injury.
“Left side.”
Natasha watches briefly, but returns to Stark when he accidentally kicks over the toolbox and knocks an absurd amount of screws to the dirt. She picks them up as Tony tinkers with the bright little glass tube containing enough power to knock out an entire city, and then some.
“Okay, done. One plasma blast, and it should at least knock Barney the Genocidal Dinosaur out,” Tony huffs between strained gasps. His watch keeps beeping, beckoning both of the unharmed people to his side. Bruce leads Clint to the steps of the pod and props him against them. It dawns him, hunched with his peers, that there’s someone unaccounted for in their Brady Bunch.
“Where’s Lang?” Tony says.
“He,” Bruce looks around, brows together in confusion. “He went with Steve, didn’t he?”
“Fuck.”
-----
The first thing Scott notices is that none of the street lamps are on. They’re covered in cobwebs on the fancy curled tops, and a rusty brown colors the base of the otherwise forest green painted metal. Even weirder, all the windows of the buildings he passes are boarded up or shattered. It’s like the whole place hasn’t been touched in years, which is weird because they've only been post-apocalyptic for about twenty six days as far as he’s been told.
Scott squints. It’s hard to see anything through all the fog, but he wants to do some recon. An army wouldn’t notice a fly coming at them, after all. Cap’ll be thankful for his quick thinking.
Dust floats in the air, and he’s instantly grateful his Ant-Man suit has a mask so he doesn’t have to breathe it in. He steers his new ant-buddy Antabell through the massive single window of a drugstore.
“Giddyup!” he cries, lightly kicking her thorax. She veers in the direction of the shelved medicine. They fly a couple laps around the interior until Scott’s satisfied. His boots leave tiny footsteps as he marches across the counter toward the back area.
“Hello?” he calls out. Nada. Scott places both hands on his hips. Maybe he should’ve stayed with the team, he thinks.
The place is a pigsty. An orange pill bottle lays on its side an inch away and the counter is covered in white round pills. All the stuff on the shelves are either thrown to the grown, knocked over, or torn apart.
“I think we’re in the clear,” Scott tells the ant. He looks over his shoulder and jumps so far he almost stumbles off the edge. “Holy shit!”
A clear slug-slash-leech looking thing about the size of Scott’s normal sized thumb has Antabell’s abdomen in its mouth, swinging her around pathetically like a dog with a chew toy. Blue and purple veins decorate its back in stripes. A set of small, glassy black eyes follow his movements as he charges it.
“Let go of her!”
Scott kicks the creature by the mouth, but that only pisses it off. It clamps down harder. Even worse, his slime-slick boot clings to the countertop so he has to hop to get the next hit in and ends up almost getting his fist trapped between the leech-thing’s tiny teeth. Her abdomen pops like a grape. He grows to full size and squashes the slimy clear leech with his hand.
-----
No one speaks, because no one has anything to say. They walk in silence, save for the scraping of boot on stone and Rocket’s occasional damning of every deity he can imagine, including the Norse ones.
Steve counts the painted stars to pass the time. He gets to the fifteen when they finally approach what looks to the city limits. The graffiti ends on the outskirts of the town behind a thick, white stripe of paint. In the fields beside the road stands a welcome sign, but the name has been carved away by some kind of blade.
Some vehicles remain upright on the road, dented and windows smashed, but most are flipped or completely flattened. This pattern continues well into the city; storefronts smashed, sidewalks destroyed. Newspapers float in the wind.
Worst of all, there’s ash here, gently falling from the featureless sky like winter’s first snow. Rocket holds up a hand and catches a few pieces. His hackles stands up on instinct. He shakes his palm and rubs it on his jacket. Something feels off-key, as if every breath was in the key of D sharp, dancing on the edge of unnatural, stifling. The air is thick, humid and heavy and impossible to see past about a block.
Thor stops in the middle of the road. To the east stands an ornate, brick church that’s more stained glass than it is brick. He spies a shadow in the colors, shifting with him. He tilts his head; the shadow tilts too. He steps back; the shadow blurs. Against his better instinct, he keeps Stormbreaker at his side. Thor needs to be a leader, a team player. Tactically, running into battle with your position already compromised is dodgy.
“We’re being watched,” he says. By the time Steve’s figured out where Thor is staring, the shadow is gone.
“I don’t see anything,” Steve replies.
Nebula points at the most southwestern building: a school. The architecture feels familiar, possibly as old as Steve himself. The windows on the lower levels are boarded up, but the upper floors are clear, seemingly untouched by the disaster that laid waste.
“Rhodes and I will go there,” she says. “It’s large, and we will be able to cover ground the quickest.”
“And why is that?” Rocket asks.
“Most of you are human,” she says, melancholy tinting her words. “Your legs will tire. Ours won’t.”
“We will take that one,” Thor calls, pointing at the church. “Right, Rabbit?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll walk between the two and keep an eye out for any ambushes from the outside. If you run into anyone, radio it in. Don't engage. Stick with your buddy,” Steve says. “When you clear the building, move onto the next one.”