Chapter 15. Tony's Story Part 1
The sun was rapidly setting down over the snow-covered horizon, the freezing wind howling through the openings on the large and cold room. The echoes of voices, of shouts and footsteps were long gone. The only sound that remained was a low and painful wheezing, the sound of a dying man fighting for his life.
Tony Stark laid on the frozen floor of a semi-darkened room, trapped inside his disabled armor, its dead weight too much for his injured body to move around easily. His panicked eyes shone brightly with unshed tears, a red gleam reflected on his dilatated pupils. He’d tried everything his desperate mind could think of to escape, to no avail. He was too tired, his body too wounded and his mind too unfocused to look for a way out of that frozen place. His labored breath echoed around him, the twisted metal from his armor imbedding itself more deeply with each movement of his chest.
He was rapidly losing consciousness, the warm blood dripping through his many wounds cooling almost instantly over his cold skin, pooling around him with alarming speed on the cracked floor. Tony was in shock, the events leading to his current situation played on a constant loop inside his head, paralyzing his every effort to come up with a way to escape. His desperation grew larger with each painful breath, the realization that he was in a very real danger of dying was dulled by a sort of sickening acceptance, an insidious voice inside his head whispering to let go, to end all the pain and suffering.
The day's last rays of sun hit the opening on the far wall, flooding the room with a bright light before disappearing completely, leaving Tony immersed in an unforgiving darkness. But for a brief instant, the light caught on something on the floor, reflecting a bright emerald light near the far side of the room, before fading away quickly.
The reflected light caught Tony's attention, like a siren's song calling to him, its presence breaking the fog in his mind for a moment. With superhuman effort he concentrated his remaining strength, managing to turn his body over and landing on his stomach, his head hitting the ground with a sickening thud. A pitiful whimper escaped his lips, his vision going black from the sheer pain the metal stabbing his chest sparked.
Tony laid there for a long time, loosing and regaining his consciousness at intervals, his breathing becoming more elaborate and ragged with every passing minute. Laying his head on the floor he turned to look in the direction where the green light had come from. He could barely make out something lying on the floor, 'a pendant' his fuzzy mind helpfully supplied, and it slowly downed on him it was the pendant Stephen had given him all those months ago. He concluded the thing must have been ripped from him during the fight.
With his mind rapidly losing its hold on any coherent thought, he focused all his attention on that small green spark, willing himself to make a last effort to get to it. He dragged his wounded body along the icy surface, the metal of the suit scrapping the floor with each movement. Body shaking and out of breath, he extended his rapidly numbing hand expecting to reach the pendant, only for his fingers to grasp something cold and metallic. The captain's shield was laying there in front of him, obstructing his way.
An angry and desperate grunt escaped Tony’s lips as he tried to push the shield away, but his bloody hands were slippery and unresponsive, so in the end he decided to half-crawl over the thing. With one final effort he finally managed to reach the pendant from where it laid among some debris.
Once he held it, his muddled mind supplied no useful information. Not sure anymore why he had made the effort to get it, he succumbed to the blissful darkness once more, the hand holding the pendant dropping to the floor, his fist giving it a small squeeze before he lost all sense of his body, laying there completely still.
A few seconds went by before a bright orange light illuminated the darkened room, a muffled shout could be heard from the other side, before a tall shape stepped through the portal, falling to its knees next to Tony's cold body.
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Chaos reigned inside the compound. People ran from one side of the room to the other, hurried orders were being shouted while a stretcher was pushed with urgency through a pair of double doors and into an operating room.
Stephen Strange and Pepper Potts followed the stretcher closely, their hurried steps almost at a run to keep up with the medics. Tony Stark’s injured body had been rescued from an abandoned Siberian bunker twenty minutes ago, with clear signs of organ failure and severe blood loss.
Stephen had had to pried open the suit using his magic, the discarded pieces the only witnesses of the brutal fight Tony had been involved in. While the compound's medical personnel laid Tony into a stretcher, Stephen unglued his eyes from the broken man to look at the metal shield Tony had been holding when he found him. The suit's massive dent on its chest piece gave Stephen a clear idea of what had happened, but not the reason behind it.
A sudden rage filled the sorcerer, whatever had happened between Tony and the Captain, it had been ugly, and by the looks of it, the super soldier had not restrained himself. Stephen's clenched jaw was the only visible sign of the tremor boiling inside him. For an instant he felt tempted to flee the scene and hunt down the captain like a rabid dog, but he knew he was needed right where he was, they still weren’t sure if Tony could survive his injuries, so the sorcerer took a few calming breaths, clearing his mind and focused on the tasks at hand.
Both Pepper and Stephen came to a halt in front of the operating room’s double doors, and he suddenly felt Pepper’s hand griping his arm tightly.
"Stephen please, look after him, make sure they do everything in their power to save him" she said with pleading eyes, her somber face reflecting her deep grief.
He could only blink, a tight lump in his throat making it impossible to get out any words. He knew Tony’s life was fading quickly, but he would be damned if he didn’t do everything in his power to help the man. Giving Pepper a quick nod, he turned around, stepping into a room full of doctors and nurses working to save Tony Stark's life.