Tony/The Bad Part
*
The Hulk launches another monitor against the wall where it explodes into a dozen pieces before turning to face Tony, his eyes bulging. He’s got Clint tucked under one arm, the archer's limbs flopping lifelessly as the Hulk paces back and forth, blood dripping steady from the wrist where the IV tore.
“Hey! ” Tony scolds automatically, then tries, a beat too late, to spin it into something a little less judgmental, a little more casual. Something almost friendly. “Hey. Hey there. Hey, Big Guy.”
He takes a careful step forward with his arms out, his hands open in the non-threatening way that works so well with the Hulk, when he’s agreeable. Of course he doesn’t look terribly agreeable right now, and surrounded by medical equipment and holding an obviously ill teammate it’s very probable that the Hulk can’t be calm right now, that he can’t be reasoned with, no matter how genial Tony’s voice.
“You did it. You saved Hawkeye,” Tony tries, because the Hulk is an Avenger and likes to be a hero as much as any of them. “Great job. We’ll get Natasha, too.” It takes everything he has not to flinch as the Hulk paces again, pivoting on one meaty heel, Clint’s head lolling dangerously in the process. “Now we need to get them out of here. We need to take them home. So let me...let me have him, okay?”
It almost works. The Hulk quiets, considering, and Tony creeps forward again, his expression as calm as he can muster when his heart is hammering away in his chest, even managing a smile. It almost happens, and Tony’s fingertips brush Clint’s dangling arm just the door to the room bursts dramatically open.
The Hulk howls in anger and reflexively launches an IV pole in that direction, Steve managing to close the door again just in time to escape devastating injury. Tony grits his teeth—he's going to go deaf from the Hulk’s roaring one of these days, his eardrums have suffered too many same-room assaults for him not to—and, predictably, at the sound screams begin in the hallways beyond this room. The thudding of running feet, the clatter of discarded equipment.
Hardened SHIELD agents and tough-as-nails nurses might give in to that primal urge run, but not Tony. Nor does Steve, who cautiously reopens the door. They don’t get to run. Part of it is their devotion to their team, but also because when it comes to fight or flight their scales have always tipped a little heavily toward fight , even when running is the smarter option.
Steve moves to stand beside Tony, his hands also up and open, but he doesn’t manage more than a careful “Hello there” before the Hulk roars again and launches the hospital bed through the window. Then he follows, still clutching Clint.
Steve runs to the ruined wall and looks down immediately, tracking the final destination of the bed, concerned about who might have been hurt, but Tony is already building a grudge of epic proportions and doesn’t really have it in him to worry about SHIELD personnel right now. He keeps his eye on the retreating silhouette of the Hulk, leaping from one building to the next until he disappears altogether.
“Banner just pulled a King Kong with Hawkeye,” Tony says slowly, and the words must not come out right because Steve just stares at him, obviously trying to piece the thought together into something more coherent. Tony gestures toward the broken window and laughs suddenly, a sound somewhere between incredulity and delight. At the same moment an alarm starts going off in SHIELD Medical—too late; the danger has already passed—and Tony laughs again. “He just. You know. Took him. Spirited him away to God knows where.”
“I know,” Steve says finally, and puts his hand on Tony’s shoulder as Thor appears behind them, looking slightly harried, his arms heaped full of blankets. “The Hulk ran off with Clint,” Steve tells him, obviously trying to process the idea himself more than actually explain it
Tony blinks first at Thor and then at one bare foot dangling just visibly from the bottom of a blanket. The toenails on it are painted a sparkly purple. “Is that Natasha you have stuffed in there?”
“Yes.”
Thor says this as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, and Tony laughs again, really laughs, leaning over slightly to brace himself against his knees. But when Nick Fury bursts into the room angrily enough that the door bangs against the wall, the sound is like a gunshot, and Tony’s hands clench into fists, the laughing fit cut off so abruptly that it may as well never had existed at all.
*
Fury’s explanation of the procedure itself is both brief and too long, full of ideas that Tony had never wanted to hear applied to human beings, much less people he actually cares about. He never wanted to picture Natasha and Clint strapped down and screaming, or how they'd suffered afterward. He doesn’t want to imagine the thing that could reduce Natasha to the state she's in now, unaware of the conversation going on around her, sitting upright only with Steve's support, leaning heavily into him with her eyes closed and mouth hanging half open.
It feels wrong to see her this way, and somehow more invasive than if he’d happened upon her naked, because Natasha would never want to be seen like this, would never put herself into that sort of position in her right mind. Tony watches Steve’s hand stroke Natasha’s hair as Fury drones on and on and thinks that he should stop this, wishing more than anything that she would rouse suddenly and grumpily demand to know who the hell Steve thinks he is, remind him that she hates to be pawed at, that personal space is a thing.
Fury pulls copies of the consent forms from his desk, Natasha’s flowing handwriting on one, Clint’s messy counterpart on the other. Steve pointedly does not look at them, and Tony does no more than glance, but there’s no denying the legitimacy of those signatures. It’s like a punch to the gut, imagining them signing it, imagining themselves agreeing to pain and terror all to protect someone else’s secrets. It was voluntary, Fury keeps pointing out, but-
“Where was the choice?” Tony bites out finally, not wanting to look at Natasha, or at Fury, or at that paper, or anywhere. He’s tired, suddenly, so goddamned tired. “A hole in their memory or a hole in the head. Where's the choice if the other option is death?”
“It’s not like—”
“Goddamn you.”
Steve’s words are more of a weary pronouncement than a curse, but they cut Fury's off neatly, and they sit in silence for awhile, Fury staring out the window of his office and working his jaw. Steve keeps running his hand methodically through Natasha’s hair as if it's the only thing he knows how to do. She doesn't move. Tony sights and glances down at his phone; no word yet from either Thor or JARVIS on the location of the Hulk.
“At least let me send some of our nurses to the Tower to help.” The offer probably the closest thing to an apology any of them will ever get. Fury settles his eyes on Natasha, looking older than his years. “They’ll be weak for a few days.”
“We’ll help them,” Tony says definitively, and Steve nods in agreement.
Maybe it would be smarter to accept some help; while they can care for Clint easily enough it might be more awkward with Natasha. Tony can hire a private nurse or even ask Pepper to help out—as soon as that idea presents itself, Tony knows that it's the right one. No outsiders can be tolerated right now, and certainly no one from SHIELD. Not for a long while, and maybe not ever again.
“Do you think I wanted this?” Fury’s voice sounds weary. Sounds defeated. Sounds like almost something pitiable. “That I like doing this kind of thing?”
That’s exactly what Tony thinks.
*
The interior of the jet is small, sure, but here’s no reason Bruce should hit Tony’s seat every goddamned time he completes another circuit of distressed pacing, but he does. It’s so improbably consistent that if Tony wasn’t about ready to crawl right out of his own skin he’d actually be a little impressed.
“His arm is broken,” Bruce almost sobs. One hand darts to his face to indulge in his go-to nervous habit of adjusting his glasses, but they’re back in SHIELD Medical somewhere, and Bruce just ends up mashing his fingers uselessly against his nose instead. “The right one—I'm sure of it. And maybe some ribs. He needs an X-ray. Tony, we need to get him x-rayed.”
“We will,” Tony says shortly, gripping the controls tighter, biting back a reflexive snarl when Bruce knocks against his seat yet again.
“And then he needs a head CT, so we can see exactly what those bastards—”
And nope nope nope, the last thing they need is for Bruce to switch gears from self-flagellation to anger, because that leads to very bad things indeed. Tony abruptly leaves the flying to JARVIS and catches his friend on the next fretful orbit, depositing him firmly into the pilot's seat. “Banner. Stop. Sit. Chill out and pretend to fly or something. You can press buttons, make laser noises...it's super fun.”
Bruce sighs and puts his head into his hands, peering out only long enough to offer Tony a rather anemic attempt at a smile. Tony gives him an awkward pat on the shoulder and heads to the back, where Thor is seated with Clint in his arms. His muscles feel slow, his feet unwilling to cooperate and move him forward. He doesn't want to go back there. He doesn’t want to see what's been done to Clint.
This is the bad part. Tony hates this part.
If being an Avenger could be purely adrenaline, could be all flying and shooting constant ass-kicking it would be a joy, but all their triumphs are always tempered by this. It's the part that Tony dreads the most—the fallout, the aftermath, dealing with damage, especially when the human kind. Right now it means helping Bruce limp through another post-Hulk cycle of shame and self-loathing, and it means Tony forcing himself to look at a suffering teammate. He would gladly offer up all he owned to skip this part altogether and fast forward to everyone grumpily recovering, marveling at their good luck in surviving once again.
“How’re you doing?”
It's a pointless question; Clint is obviously incapable of any sort of answer, his eyes open but unfocused. He’s pale and drenched in sweat, perhaps from fever, but more likely from the way Thor has completely encased him in every emergency blanket the jet has aboard. Tony opens his mouth to joke about Asgardian swaddling techniques but can’t quite produce the words; nothing seems particularly funny right now. Aside from the Hulk-inflicted injuries Clint should look just as he did when he left a week ago for that mission, but whatever SHIELD did has wrung the life right out of him, making an otherwise healthy body seem somehow frail and insubstantial. Tony reaches out gently to take his hand, but Clint's fingers just slide bonelessly from his grip and Tony lets them fall, barely registering it when Thor carefully tucks that hand back into the nest of blankets.
Part of Tony wants to demand that JARVIS fly them faster, wants to evict Bruce from the pilot’s seat and urge the jet on himself, wants to hurry them along to x-rays and CT scans and whatever answers they can find. But the rest of him wants to avoid dealing with Bruce's distress, wants to delay seeing Natasha crushed helplessly against Steve, and dreads the moment Thor pulls back all those blankets to reveal the damage hidden beneath. That rest of Tony never wants to land this jet, wants to fly forever because as bad as this part is, what's coming next will almost surely be worse.