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cap_ironman2013-03-17 12:48 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2013-03-17 12:48 am
Entry tags:
Reassembled, Chapter 11
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 11
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and <elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Detailed discussion of (past) mind-control-induced dub-con/non-con in this chapter.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with initial brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Chapter Eleven
"It's imperative that it not be exposed to direct sunlight," Dr. Thomas said for the third time. "The damage would be irreparable."
"Our scientific consultant has spoken to both your exhibit curator and to several archival preservation and manuscript conservation specialists from the New York Public Library's special collections department at length," Jan said, smiling up at him with publicity-perfect charm. Beside her, Steve was projecting square-jawed trustworthiness for all he was worth.
The Metropolitan Museum's manuscript curator was visibly nervous about entrusting a valuable sixteenth century manuscript to a bunch of costumed superheroes; Sam's careful explanation of the Mansion's security system hadn't reassured him much, which, considering the number of times the place had been attacked, blown-up, set on fire, or otherwise subjected to major structural damage, wasn't surprising.
At the end of the day, Thomas had to answer to the museum's board of trustees, as well as to the donors who had given them the book in the first place. The donors wanted the book to be protected from theft, especially theft by international terrorists, but also wanted it to go back on display as soon as possible, and the trustees were highly skeptical about the existence of any "so called curse" as well as the necessity of having Dr. Strange remove it.
"The Dee manuscript is going to be stored in an airtight, temperature and humidity controlled glass case." Hank's smile was considerably more fixed than Jan's. "It will be kept at 50°F and 49% relative humidity, inside a secure vault. In the dark. You can examine it if you want to."
Dr. Thomas smoothed his hair down with one hand and fixed Hank with a steady, assessing stare. "I would appreciate that. I understand you're a chemist, Dr. Pym?"
"Biochemistry and dimensional physics."
Behind Dr. Thomas, and slightly to his left, one of the museum's assistant curators was carefully cradling the hermetically sealed box that contained the John Dee manuscript. Wanda was hovering at her elbow, staring at the box as if she expected it explode. If he looked closely, Sam almost thought he could see light glowing through the thin material of her gloves.
He would have dismissed it as his imagination, but Redwing had mantled his feathers, let out a steam-whistle scream of offense, and taken off for the sky the moment the museum staff, and their box, had come within twenty feet of him. He had flatly refused Sam's suggestion that he come back down, projecting an impression of fear and disgust, and a mental image of the box distorted into the shape of a giant, evil-looking owl. There is a predator inside that, Sam translated.
"We're glad to help the museum in any way," Steve was saying. "Dr. Strange will examine the book as soon as possible, and we'll get it back to you folks in no time."
"I hope so." The assistant curator shifted her grip on the manuscript box, grimacing slightly, then added, "I'm skeptical about this 'curse,' but the exhibit has been plagued by bad luck since it began, and one of our conservationists swears that it whispered to him when he tried to assess its condition. He's not usually a man given to superstition."
She was around Sam's age, with well-defined muscles in her arms that probably came from hauling manuscripts around, and mid-toned, coppery skin, and had shown no sign of Dr. Thomas's tendency to talk down to them all. Between himself and Hank, Sam had gotten the better end of the bargain.
"I didn't feel anything creepy around it," Sam told her, "but people whose opinions I trust think it's dangerous."
"The attack..." She shook her head. "Supervillains are one thing. Doctor Octopus tried to steal a Vermeer from us right after I first started working for the Met, but nobody's ever come in with guns before. They killed two people. Art thieves don't operate that way. It's not something you-" she broke off, her voice catching, then took a deep breath. "My fiancé keeps trying to get me to move out of New York."
People who weren't from New York always had an exaggerated impression of how dangerous it was — or how dangerous cities in general were. It was a toss-up whether the media liked scary inner-city gang violence or maniacal supervillains more in terms of depicting the city as a dangerous place full of sub-human criminals. Not to mention, "Where else are you going to get to work with a collection like that?"
"The Smithsonian, or the British Museum," she said, matter-of-factly, "but one doesn't have job openings in my field and the other one requires moving to England. Plus, I did an internship at the National Archives right after I finished school. You couldn't pay me money to go back to a DC commute." She shifted the box again, and nodded at Hank and Thomas. "Dr. Thomas is waving at me. I think it's time to go install this in your vault."
The vault had foot-thick steel alloy walls, with half-inch adamantium plating. It was meant to contain dangerous and potentially explosive tech, including Tony, if the Extremis were ever hacked again.
The original Mansion's plans had shown a shielded energy containment room in this location, designed to keep Jack of Heart's powers under control. Sam had never actually seen it, but he'd seen the damage Jack's body had caused — even after death, his flesh had still been charged with energy. Anything that could contain that was overkill to protect a book.
The manuscript case looked lonely and out of place against the sterile metal walls; Jan had lined the bottom in red velvet, like a display case. She'd suggested that they donate the thing to the museum when the book was returned, as a gesture of good will.
It wasn't a bad idea; when Thomas examined the case, his nervousness and general hostility decreased to almost nothing, replaced by stiff professionalism. By the time Hank and Jan were walking him out, he was almost smiling.
They hadn't needed Tony and his prominent donor status to make this go smoothly after all. Just a couple of pretty faces — Steve included — and someone to talk science.
The vault door was heavy enough that it took both Steve and Sam together to haul it shut. If Thor were there, he could have done it singlehandedly, but diplomacy was not his strong suit, and he'd had business in Valhalla.
Sam leaned his weight against the door to make sure it was fully shut while Steve keyed in the electronic lock. It beeped once, then engaged, unaffected by Wanda's presence only a few feet away; Tony had designed it to be resistant to energy fluctuations.
Probably a good thing, considering what they were shutting inside it.
"I can still feel it," Wanda said, frowning at the door. "It's fainter, but it's still there. The vault shielding doesn't block it."
Steve nodded at the door. "Is there anything you can do?"
She shrugged. "I can put some protective sigils around it, but that's not really my specialty."
There was a familiar, whiny "feed me" meow from the doorway, and then the cat padded silently into the room, sneering at Sam on his way to Steve — he and Redwing loathed each other, and he considered Sam to be an extension of Redwing.
Halfway to Steve, the cat froze. For a long, motionless moment, he stared at the vault with his back arched and his tail puffed out like a bottle brush. Then he hissed and streaked out of the room.
"Put on lots of sigils," Sam suggested.
An hour later, Steve was still trying to get the cat to come out from under the living room couch.
"Leave it alone. He'll take your hand off if you stick it under there again."
Steve ignored Sam's advice and stuck his hand back under the couch, causing the cat to make an evil growling sound and retreat even further.
"Come on, Patton," Steve coaxed. "It's okay."
All six-foot-two-inches of Steve were stretched out on the floor, his chin propped on one wrist as he stared under the couch — it was low enough to the floor that his arm only fit under it up to the elbow. It should have been funny, but the sounds of defensive fear coming from the cat made the hair on the back of Sam's neck stand up.
In the back of his head, he could sense Redwing's wary reluctance to return to the Mansion, balanced against the knowledge that Sam and food were both there. Redwing didn't spook easily. Neither did the cat, who had stood his ground against two and a half pounds of pissed off, territorial red-tailed hawk without blinking.
Keeping that book here was a bad idea, and not just because of the insurance disaster it would be if something happened to it while it was in their custody.
'One of our conservationists swears that it whispered to him,' the curator had said. She'd sounded skeptical, but she'd held the box uncomfortably.
Daredevil had heard whispering in the cathedral, before Chthon had influenced a previously law-abiding man into attacking Strange. Wanda had said that she could feel both Chthon and the magic in the book trying to speak to her because of her powers, but magical ability didn't seem to be necessary.
Between Hank, Tony, and Wanda, they had enough unstable people in the house without adding evil chaos magic that spoke to people in their heads to the mix.
The cat made a particularly vicious spitting noise, and Steve jerked his hand out from under the couch, rubbing at a set of nasty-looking scratches that scored the back of his leather glove. "I'm not trying to hurt you, cat," he said, his jaw setting firmly.
Trust Steve to try to lecture a cat. "Have you tried food?" Sam suggested. "It works for Clint."
Steve pushed himself up to his knees, brushing a scattering of orange fur off the front of his costume. "Wanda, your arms are smaller than mine. Do you want to-"
"No," she said, firmly. She eyed the couch warily, and added, "I don't blame him. I don't like having that book in the house, Cap. We need Strange here as soon as possible."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "I know. I couldn't get any answer from him when I called, or from Wong." Calling Strange was a shot in the dark at the best of times, since he rarely carried a cell phone and often spent months away from home. He also seemed to regard the internet with a baffled and vaguely intimidated disinterest that Sam didn't expect from someone who usually seemed convinced of his own omniscience.
Wanda arched an eyebrow. "Did you try asking the Night Nurse? I think the two of them are involved."
"Jan thinks so too," Steve said. "So yes, we did. She said he and Wong are in another dimension. It's got something to do with Dormammu, and weaknesses in the dimensional walls around Manhattan. Apparently, Chthon's toe-hold in the city is like a giant, inter-dimensional beacon to all kinds of nasty things straight out of HP Lovecraft's nightmares."
Wanda's lips tightened, and she looks away, rubbing at the back of one hand. "I didn't think of that. I'm the one who brought him here."
That was bullshit, and Sam said as much. "You didn't choose to come here. There's only so much you can do when you're being mind-controlled, it's hard enough just to fight the control off. And there's no point in blaming anyone now, anyway; what's done is done." If there was one thing about his fellow Avengers that irritated him — and when had he started thinking of them as 'fellow Avengers?' He'd intended to join the team only temporarily, had no more intention of being their long-term token anti-Registration hero than he'd once had of being their 'token minority guy' — it was the way so many of them seemed to spend half their time feeling guilty for the wrong things.
Steve might be capable of prolonged sulking fits and epic cases of missing the point, but he didn't wallow in guilt or self-pity.
"It's nobody's fault," Steve said firmly.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of orange-furred movement under the couch. The cat had crept forward while they were talking, now that Steve was no longer poking at him.
Sam dropped to the floor and reached under the couch, grabbing for the scruff of his neck. The cat squawked, and tried to bite him, raking Sam's forearm with his back feet. It was nothing compared to the damage Redwing could do to his arms and shoulders without even trying, especially not through a long-sleeved shirt, so he ignored the needle-sharp caws and hauled the cat out, handing it up to Steve. "Here. Maybe he'll feel safer if you take him to the other end of the mansion."
"I was planning to." Steve cradled the cat against his chest, not seeming to care that it was currently wrapped around his arm, kicking and biting and making vaguely demonic sounds.
"You aren't good with cats," Sam observed. "Remember that time you kept your neighbor's cat for a week and it ran every time it saw you coming?"
Steve shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed. "It was afraid of my shield."
Probably, Sam reflected, because Steve had a habit of throwing his shield indoors when he was bored, something that he couldn't blame any self-respecting cat for objecting to. Sharing an apartment with Steve had been an exercise in broken lamps, cracked picture frames, and arguing over the radio — Steve had refused to listen to anything recorded after about 1960 that wasn't by the Rat Pack, which Sam suspected had been done out of a deliberate desire to be irritating. Sam had retaliated by spending entire days speaking in 70s and 80s slang he knew Steve had never heard of.
They'd been remarkably stupid in their twenties.
"Just give him some cat treats and leave him alone" he said. "It works with Redwing."
Wanda reached out to poke tentatively at one of the cat's front feet, then snatched her hand back as he swiped at her. "He has an extra toe on his front foot. I never noticed that before." Then, to the cat, "Hello, kitty, are you a mutant too? Yes, you are. An angry mutant."
Sam exchanged glances with Steve, and saw his own amusement reflected in Steve's expression. "I'd say something about girls and animals," he said, "but Hawkeye talks to it the same way."
Wanda pulled her hand, half extended to touch the cat, back again. "I always wanted a kitten when I was little," she said, a touch of defensiveness in her voice, "but we weren't allowed to have them because they're dirty."
"They wash themselves all the time," Steve objected, his eyebrows going up skeptically.
"Yes," Wanda said. "With their tongues."
When you looked at it that way, it did sound kind of disgusting. "I never had pets growing up either," Sam offered. "The superintendent in our apartment building hated them."
"Neither did I." The cat gave one more high-pitched growl then subsided into long-suffering silence, clearly having given up. Steve scratched it behind one ear with a gloved finger. "See, if you hold him long enough, he eventually calms down."
Wanda rubbed the cat's other ear, carefully, then smiled when he leaned his head into her hand. "The book will be gone soon, kitty," she told him. "I won't let it hurt you." She paused for a second, stroking the six-toed foot splayed against Steve's scale-mail. "I'm glad I didn't hurt you," she added.
What was she — Then it hit Sam. Something like ninety-eight percent of human mutations had nothing to do with the X gene. All of them had been unaffected by M-Day; Wanda's power had clearly been going by Chthon's intent, rather than a literal application of her words.
'No more mutants,' taken literally, could have completely halted evolution, going by what Sam remembered from high school biology. Or erased most of the human population from existence — just about everybody had some kind of mutation, from blue eyes, to sickle cell disease, to cats with six toes.
Reality altering powers were something Sam preferred not to think about too hard — the broader implications were too disturbing. One little nudge at reality, and your entire life could be rewritten, huge chunks of your past erased or replaced. Powers could be given to you or taken away again, just like that. One wish spoken by the wrong person could change who you were.
Tony claimed to be able to remember parts of his life in the alternate universe Reed Richard's kid had created. Wanda could remember bits and pieces of Magneto's mutant-dominated alternate reality. Sam had had two sets of memories long before either of those.
"It's not your fault," Steve said, to Wanda. "Like I said, if we blamed everyone on the team who'd ever been mind-controlled for what they did under mind-control, we'd have to court-martial pretty much everybody except Jan."
"Don't push our luck." Sam bent down and made a show of knocking on the edge of the coffee table. "If you say that too many times, Jan will be next."
Wanda's lips twitched, but then she sobered, the smile vanishing before it had fully formed. "It might not be my fault, but knowing that won't bring Vision back." She tried to smile again, but this time it was visibly forced. "He liked cats, too. We talked about getting one from the humane society, but then I got pregnant, and a new pet plus two babies would have been too much to handle."
It felt like he ought to say something, but Sam couldn't think what. 'I'm sorry,' or 'I know how you feel,' or any of the other platitudes people handed out after someone died were more for the sake of courtesy than anything else. 'You've never watched your best friend be gunned down right in front of you, so no, you don't know how I feel,' was not a response people were equipped to handle, either.
Steve shifted the cat to one arm, and reached back to rub at his neck with his free hand. "I'll try calling Linda again," he said awkwardly. "Maybe Strange is back now." He turned to go, and Wanda reached for his arm.
"Let me call her. I know Stephen better than you do."
Sam left them to it, and went outside to see if he could get his own frightened animal companion to calm down — Redwing's agitation was a continual presence in his mind, making him feel edgy, and his own thoughts about reality and memories weren't helping.
He shoved the worries aside with an effort, and spent the next ten minutes coaxing Redwing down off the roof of a neighboring building.
* * *
It was nearly nine, dinner had been over an hour ago, and where the hell was Tony? The last thing Steve had heard from him had been via Maria Hill, when she'd called to deliver a curt message that Tony had "discovered information which confirms that Sin is working with Victor von Doom." Then, when Steve had tried to ask questions, she'd hung up.
Taking a piece of vital tactical information and dropping completely out of contact with it for hours wasn't like Tony. Or rather, it was, but when Tony decided to keep something to himself because he was certain he could deal it on his own, he tended to keep everyone he knew completely in the dark about it. He certainly didn't tell the command staff of SHIELD and have them call the Avengers.
Steve kicked the door to their room closed behind him, and let himself drop backward onto the bed, arms flung out. Tony was fine. Sharon or Bucky would have called him if Maya's examination had gone badly.
He was fine. He was just being an uncommunicative jackass, because some business deal or other at Stark Enterprises, defragmenting his armor, or redesigning SE's tablet computer from the ground up because the patent infringement case had suddenly turned in HP's favor, was so important that he'd lost track of time.
It wasn't unusual for Tony to do that. Steve firmly squashed the thought that Tony could easily have used the Extremis to call him at any point, without even the need for access to a phone; he'd spent weeks trying to get Tony to use the Extremis less frequently, and just because it would be more convenient for him right now if Tony used it didn't mean it couldn't hurt him.
He'd been completely worn out by it yesterday afternoon, when Steve had found him lying on the bed in the dark, obviously suffering from another headache. This time, it had been bad enough that he'd actually confessed to overdoing it and agreed to talk to Maya.
Steve stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of all the things that might be going wrong with the Extremis in order to cause those headaches, or all the potential non-work-related reasons for why Tony hadn't come home yet or called.
He felt restless, twitchy, the kind of useless, jumpy energy he usually burned off by going for a run or working out, but a hand-to-hand workout with Sam earlier hadn't made a dent in it.
Sam had been on edge, too, throwing himself into the practice with a little too much enthusiasm. Because of the John Donne manuscript, probably. He and Wanda were both uneasy about it, and they still hadn't managed to get Strange on the phone.
And Hank was spending far too much time walled up in his lab, between the containment unit for that damn book, and whatever genetics project he was working on with Beast. He was probably trying to avoid Thor, but now he'd started asking the other Avengers for blood samples, and Steve wasn't looking forward to the explosion that was going to come when Thor heard about it.
And the newspaper articles about himself and Tony were still coming out. When Jarvis had started screening or blocking all calls from the media, they'd started calling the West Coast and badgering Henry Hellrung instead, trying to get him to tell them the juicy details of his possibly hypothetical fling with Tony. Steve had carefully not asked Tony if there was any truth to the rumors, because he would undoubtedly have to work with Hellrung in the future, and having too much knowledge of anything that had happened between them would make that awkward. The tabloids seemed hell-bent on ruining Steve's deliberate ignorance, though.
At least Sally Floyd had apologized for breaking the story without telling them, though she'd put most of the blame on Tony for not answering his phone.
That seemed to be a habit of his recently.
Steve checked his watch, found that only seven minutes had passed since the last time he'd checked it, and sighed. Calling Tony's office again would only get him an answering machine at this time of night, and contacting him via the Avengers communicator built into the armor would be an abuse of team communications equipment.
Thirteen minutes later, Tony appeared in the doorway.
'He looks tired,' was Steve's first thought. The dark smudges under his eyes that had been there this morning were deeper now, and his hair was a mess. His white dress shirt was crumpled and smeared with grease and machine oil, and there was a dark streak — probably more oil — down the side of his face.
He hadn't been doing something for SE. He'd been elbow deep in a quinjet engine, or overhauling the armor.
Steve's worry vanished in the heat of irritation. "Where have you been all day?" he demanded, sitting up with a jerk. "Sub-director Hill wouldn't give me anything other than that Doom and Sin are working together. You can't find out something like that and then go to radio silence for hours."
Tony's expression didn't flicker, which somehow made Steve only want to yell at him louder, in the hopes that maybe shouting would sink in where plain old annoyance had not. He stepped into the room, closing the door behind him, and turned to face Steve. "I've been building an electromagnetic jammer to block Doom's teleportation device," he said quietly. "Someone using it can still teleport into a space where the jammer signal is being broadcast, but they can't leave."
"That's... good, I guess." Actually, it was potentially very useful, but building it hadn't required Tony to hide all day. "We should have figured this out days ago," he added, feeling a flash of irritation at himself as well. "It all makes sense now. Sin's never had any interest in magic, but Doom's been after Loki's spear for months now. It's too much of a coincidence for a book with spells for summoning chaos entities to be stolen while Chthon is in the city and for the two of them to have nothing to do with one another." In hindsight, the likelihood of Doom's involvement was almost painfully obvious. Why had none of them seen it?
Too many distractions, he decided. First Wanda's return, then that damn magazine article, not to mention the onslaught of disasters and petty supervillain attacks that had run them all ragged for weeks. Was Chthon doing it on purpose? Did he have that much influence yet, or was it just a side effect of how thin the barrier between dimensions had become inside St. Margaret's, the bad luck that followed Chthon seeping out and working in Doom's favor?
Tony rubbed one hand over his face, smearing the engine grease even further. "We need to have Wanda take a look at that book; we can't afford to wait until Strange gets back from wherever he's run off to. Doom wouldn't waste his time on it if it weren't useful to him."
Steve nodded; Doom could devote himself to a goal with a single-minded intensity that was frightening, the same vanity that had prompted him to hide his face behind a mask making him refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of failure.
The book contained spells for summoning 'angels and demons,' according to the description the assistant manuscript curator had given Sam. Could one of those be modified to summon Loki's spear right out of the cathedral, or call up something Doom could send in to fetch it? Strange's binding spell kept Doom himself from physically entering the building as long as Daredevil lived, but maybe Doom had discovered some kind of loophole.
"Redwing and Patton won't go near it," he said.
Tony made an absent noise, then started to pace back and forth at the end of the bed, left hand rubbing at his temple.
Was that a sign of another headache, or was he just thinking? Steve couldn't tell anymore, and that worried him.
He was preparing to pointedly ask if Tony was all right when Tony stopped abruptly, his back to Steve. "We can talk about Doom later," he said, a note in his voice that would have sounded dismissive if Steve hadn't known him well enough to recognize the tiredness behind it. His shoulders had stiffened, the weary slump of moments before gone. "I talked to Maya," he added, then fell silent.
Steve waited for more, and when it didn't come, made himself ask. "What did she say?"
Tony sighed. He still wasn't looking at Steve, wasn't even facing him. "You're not going to like it."
A sinking feeling in his stomach, Steve got to his feet. "It involves the Extremis, so I'm sure I won't. What is it?"
For a long moment, Tony said nothing, and Steve's stomach sank even further.
He wasn't sure what he'd been hoping for — that there would, in fact, turn out to be a problem with the Extremis and it would be something they could fix, after which the headaches would go away, or that there would be nothing wrong with it, and Maya would give Tony orders to use it less that he would actually listen to. The former. The former would have meant that Tony wasn't subconsciously doing this to himself, and that there was an easy solution. That he wasn't using the Extremis just as heavily as always and lying to Steve about trying to cut back.
Tony drew in a deep breath, and when he spoke, it was in the same cool, distant tone Steve had heard him use on television after the Helicarrier had exploded. "The Mandarin's rings introduced a bug into the Extremis, corrupted part of the code. The healing factor isn't working properly, which is why the headaches are back. Until the coding is repaired, using it causes damage, so I'm going to be less useful in the field for a little while."
"Damaged," Steve repeated slowly. "What kind of damage?"
"It doesn't matter," Tony said, so calmly that Steve felt a hot flare of anger at him. "All we have to do is fix the Extremis and it will go away."
Tony always thought he could fix things, that everything had to have an obvious, neat solution if only he were smart enough to see it and could control enough variables to put said solution into effect, preferably while telling as few people as possible. Sometimes his attempts at damage control caused even more problems than the thing he was trying to fix. Work with the government to mitigate the effects of Registration, co-operate with Loki, break the law and flatten everyone in his path to steal his stolen technology back. Shoot himself up with experimental nanotechnology to take out a monster who'd been created by the same process.
And he still wasn't looking at Steve, wasn't even facing him.
Tony wasn't going to hold this conversation with his back to Steve. He reached out, grabbed Tony by the shoulder — the solid bone and muscle beneath his fingers felt healthy, part of his mind noted, normal — and jerked him around. "What kind of damage?"
Tony's eyes narrowed, his muscles tensing, and then he relaxed again; Steve had the feeling he'd forced himself to do so. He met Steve's eyes, and said, with an attempt at a smile, "Don't worry; it's not as bad as you're thinking."
"And how bad is that?" Tony didn't look sick, hadn't seemed sick, aside from the headaches. Had there been other symptoms, ones Steve had missed? How much had he been hiding?
Tony shook his head fractionally, reaching up to lay his fingers over Steve's, still wrapped around his shoulder. "Damage was the wrong word. It's not going to do anything to me, Steve. It just hurts when I use it, and until the problem is fixed, it's going to keep hurting. Maya thinks the migraines might get worse, and there might be some other, minor side effects. It's not a big deal, just an inconvenience."
They were standing only inches apart, in what probably would have looked like a romantic pose to anyone who walked into the room — he could smell the oil staining Tony's clothes, overpowering the faint metallic scent that he always seemed to carry around with him these days. Normally, being this close to a disheveled, grease-stained Tony would have made it hard to think about anything but sex, but right now, all he could feel was relief. And irritation. Relief that Tony wasn't seriously ill, despite his momentary fears, a tight irritation at Tony for refusing to listen to everything Steve had been saying about the Extremis all along, and an irrational desire to shake Tony and snarl at him for making him worry with all this drama.
Saying 'I told you so,' would be petty. Steve lifted his hand from Tony's shoulder, letting it fall back to his side. "You could barely move last night. I think the side effects are pretty bad already."
Tony shrugged slightly. "So I'm going to have to try not to use it for anything but running the armor for a few weeks, until we figure out a solution. I know this is a bad time to have me running at less than full capacity," he went on, not giving Steve even a moment's pause in which to respond, "but we got by before I had the Extremis. I can function just fine in a fight without it. I won't be able to monitor data from the cathedral or the NYPD or anything else continually like I've been doing but that's what we have Hank for." Another practiced smile, and his fingers tightened gently on Steve's arm before letting go. "Maybe it'll even keep him busy enough to stop walking around muttering to himself about genetics and Nobel prizes; working on the storage unit for the book kept him out of trouble for a couple of days."
"You should-"
"I'm not dropping down from active duty," Tony added fiercely, "so don't even suggest it. It's not an option right now, not while Doom and Sin and Chthon are all out there."
It was true, damn him.
Very dryly, Steve said, "If I ordered you to, you'd ignore me." He was probably going to ignore his own stated plan to use the Extremis only to run the armor, too. The first time being able to access a computer or security camera or satellite transmission in his head was faster and more convenient than doing it the old fashioned way, Tony would tough it out and do things manually. The tenth time, or the first time they needed information or access to a building's security network immediately in the middle of a fight with something, all good intentions would be forgotten.
Tony offered him what was probably supposed to be an encouraging smile. "We're going to fix it. Maya's working on it right now." Steve wasn't sure if he was trying to reassure him or himself.
"And if you can't fix it, what are you going to do?"
Tony winced. "Get used to being obsolete. But it's not going to come to that."
Of course not. Tony had never met a computer program or piece of machinery he couldn't fix, and if he ever did, he'd never admit to it.
Tony came a step closer to him, one hand coming up to touch the side of Steve's face. "I swear, I did not do this on purpose." He stared into Steve's eyes, expression uncertain. His eyes were a clear, bright blue, shading to darker grey around the pupils, no hint of oily Extremis black. Steve felt a sudden urge to wipe the smudge of grease on his face away, to clean all traces of SE and his workshop off of him.
"Why would you-" he started, and then felt a chill as he remembered Tony's face that night on the Helicarrier, when Steve had accused him of being suicidal.
Tony had worked his way through a laundry list of unhealthy behaviors in the past out of some warped need to punish himself. Had tried, both subconsciously and deliberately, to hurt himself with alcohol, with recklessness, by running the clock on his breastplate or artificial heart down to the last handful of seconds over and over.
It hadn't even occurred to Steve that he would still be doing it. Not intentionally, anyway. He'd sworn he was getting better. He had been getting better.
He wrapped his arms around Tony, tightly enough that he knew it probably hurt, and buried his face in Tony's shoulder. The prickly hair of Tony's goatee scraped against his skin, and his shirt smelled like oil and some kind of eye-watering industrial solvent. Steve closed his eyes, and didn't pull away. "I believe you."
"I know this is my own fault, but I really didn't mean for it to happen." One of Tony's hands rubbed up and down Steve's back. "I won't let it be a liability for the team. I promised Wanda I'd be there if Chthon got her again, and I promised you—"
"Promise me you won't do anything to make this worse," Steve interrupted. It was supposed to be an order, but came out sounding like something entirely different.
Tony's hands slid under his shirt, cool against his skin, and his touch was suddenly anything but soothing. "Of course not. I don't actually enjoy being in pain."
There were moments when Steve doubted that, but saying wouldn't do any good. Neither would getting angry, which was impossible anyway when Tony was touching him that way.
Steve kissed him, hard, then made himself pull back and be gentle. Tony didn't look sick, didn't feel sick — part of him, in fact, felt very aggressively healthy — but the memory of Tony curled into a tight ball on the bed, eyes screwed shut in pain and dried blood under his fingernails, was still vivid.
"I will pull you from active duty if I see you using the Extremis," he said into Tony's skin, as he started unbuttoning Tony's shirt. It was a promise, not a threat. "And to hell with Chthon. You'll be a liability if you end up in such bad shape that you can't take care of yourself in the field."
"You say the most romantic things," Tony said, and grabbed for Steve with enough force that all attempts to be slow and gentle went out the window.
They landed on the bed hard, with Tony on top, and Steve spared a moment to be grateful that they had tested its structural integrity thoroughly. A less well-built piece of furniture wouldn't have taken kindly to having four hundred pounds abruptly dropped on top of it.
Then he didn't do any more thinking for a long time.
* * *
The air was thick with dust, and her eyes kept tearing up. Carol tried to use the back of her arm to wipe some of the fine, grey and white powder out of her eyes, and only succeeded in making it worse. There were times when she seriously considered adding goggles to her costume, regardless of how silly they would look.
"Just keep holding that girder in place," Tony's voice crackled over her communicator. "I'm welding the support strut back into place. Once I'm done, you should be able to let go without the wall collapsing."
The floor beneath Carol vibrated slightly as a twenty-foot-tall Jan, propping up the West side of the building from the outside, turned her head to the side and coughed into her upper arm. "Weld faster," the other woman choked out.
Until nine thirty this morning, the unstable disaster area Carol and Jan were currently keeping from total collapse by main strength had been a nearly completed condominium, one of those modern ones with white walls and lots of big, glass windows. Most of the glass was currently covering either the warped and buckled floors or the street and sidewalk below; nearly all the windows on the building's north and west sides had shattered when the crane being used to complete the roof had collapsed and crashed straight through the top of the building.
The crane had sheared off part of the building's seventh, eighth, and ninth stories when it fell, finally coming to a stop in the rubble of the partially collapsed fifth and sixth floors. It was still in place, a massive piece of twisted metal that pierced through two stories, lashed into place with sticky white webbing — Spiderman's new organic webbing was stronger than the artificially produced substance he'd apparently used before, and he'd covered both the crane and a wide swath of the building's crumbling outer façade in it.
"If I try to do this any faster, the metal's temperature will increase beyond-"
"I can't hold this forever, Tony. My strength increases proportionally with my height, but this is a very big building."
Carol gritted her teeth, held the twisted steel I-beam in her hands steady — it required her to float just under the ceiling, with nothing to brace herself against — and silently echoed Jan's urgings for Tony to get on with it.
Thirty blocks to the south, something extremely large and possessed of a lot of tentacles had crawled out of the Hudson River and begun attacking lower Manhattan. Steve, Thor, and Wanda had managed to hold it off while the rest of the Avengers pulled construction workers and a handful of building staff and early move-ins out of the upper stories of the condo, but even now that Sam had flown south to join them, they were still having no success at driving it back into the river. The sooner they could get this place stable and leave the rest of the clean-up to the city, the better.
Going by the radio chatter that kept intruding on Carol's concentration, the tentacle monster secreted some kind of acidic slime. And had barbed suction cups on the undersides of its dozen arms. Carol breathed through her mouth, trying not to sneeze at the haze of plaster dust in the air, and reflected that it probably said something about her that that sounded like a more appealing challenge than this.
Where was Jen when you needed her? Or Henry and Simon — another pair of flyers would have been useful about twenty minutes ago. Even if one of them was a bland superhero wannabee who'd gotten his powers as part of a publicity stunt.
They were supposed to be temporary, but it was looking more and more as if Henry's flight powers, at least, were going to stick permanently. He'd actually looked kind of spooked when the Initiative scientists had explained that — it had made Carol like him just a little bit more.
"The police have gotten all the evacuees thirty feet away from the building," Clint said, via the comlink, cutting through Hank's babbling about tentacles and secretions. "As soon as Tony or one of the construction engineers gives the word, Jan can take off and join the monster fighting fun."
Jan coughed into her arm again. "I'll bring you back a sample of the slime, honey," she said, which cued another round of distracting babble from Hank, mostly speculation about what role the pollutants still layered in with the Hudson River mud had played in the creature's creation.
"Cute, aren't they?" Carol commented, tone dry as she could keep it while holding up several tons of brick and mortar.
"You get used to it." She could nearly hear Clint's shrug. "Hank doesn't like sitting stuff out; I think he thinks of this as helping."
"Mayhap he can help on a closed channel with Iron Man." Thor's voice, deep enough to feel in her bones even through a comlink.
"Can we pay less attention to the peanut gallery and more attention to the, ah, thing?" Steve sounded slightly annoyed. Carol sympathized.
The weight of the steel beam abruptly lessened, something else taking over the job of supporting it. "Got it," Tony said. "You can let go now, Carol. You too, Jan. The building should hold until they bring a demolition crew in to take the rest of it down properly."
"About time." Carol let go and floated back from the beam, rolling her shoulders to try and work the strain out of them. She resisted the temptation to rub at her eyes — her hands were too covered in debris for that to do anything but make things worse.
The building shuddered perceptibly as Jan stopped leaning her weight against the damaged wall, and Carol held her breath; if Tony said it would hold, it would probably hold, but the first few moments after the building settled felt very long. Thirty feet between the civilians and a potential collapse would be enough to save lives, but it was a narrow enough safety margin to be risky. People would get hurt, if Tony hadn't judged this properly, or if some unseen bit of damage made his calculations useless.
"I'm on my way, Cap." Jan's voice was clearly audible through the sheared-off break in the wall, the tinny comlink echo creating a weird Doppler effect. The ground shook slightly as she moved away, her footsteps loud and solid enough for Carol to feel them in her bones.
Carol ducked out through the hole in the wall, and let herself drop back down to the sidewalk. The ground below her was covered in glass shards and broken bits of rubble; from the air, they formed a pattern vaguely like a face, with narrowed eyes, and a gaping, grinning mouth.
She shook off fanciful thoughts and looked for a safe place to land, somewhere where she wouldn't be ankle-deep in debris.
There, near the edge of the glass's shatter radius; the imaginary face's left eye was formed by a patch of clear asphalt. Carol touched down, and glanced around for Clint — then saw him, a flash of purple by one of the ambulances.
Clint was surrounded by a small cluster of people, patting a short, grey-haired woman awkwardly on the shoulder as she sobbed into her hands. She had just lost a newly purchased apartment that had probably been close to a million-dollar investment, along with everything of hers that had been in it; what did you say to someone like that? 'I'm sorry everything you own was destroyed, but at least you're still alive?'
Clint was welcome to deal with her, and with all the other dusty and shell-shocked residents and construction workers. She didn't envy him.
Beyond Clint, two men in torn and bloody denim work-shirts were sitting on the ground, while emergency workers tended their injuries. One of them was holding a cellphone to his ear with the arm not currently swathed in bloody gauze, talking in soft, hoarse Spanish. He'd been trapped under a chunk of concrete on the fifth floor — she and Sam had pulled him out.
Beside him, a third man was stretched full-length on the asphalt, a sheet pulled over his face to hide it from the circling news copters. They had pulled him out, too, from under the same piece of rubble. He'd been alive, then.
The man with the cellphone was crying, too; she could hear it in his voice.
This hadn't been a supervillain attack. No one had made the crane collapse with powers or explosives and malicious intent; no one had tried to hurt any of these people, not on purpose. It had been pure bad luck and faulty equipment.
The lack of someone to blame didn't make that body under the white sheet feel any less like a failure. His chest had been crushed the moment the rubble hit him, and five or ten minutes either way would have made little difference, but he had been breathing when she had lifted that chunk of curtain wall off him, and he wasn't now.
You couldn't save everyone, no matter how good you were or how many powers you had.
She heard the scrape of a boot heel on pavement behind her, and turned to find Clint at her elbow. "They said he would have died anyway," he said quietly. "There wasn't anything you and Sam could have done."
The wind was cold, much colder than LA, but at least the air out here was clear. A strand of hair lashed at her eyes, catching on the edge of her mask, and Carol shoved it away with the back of her hand. "Just think, we could have spent the past half hour fighting something with twelve tentacles that oozes caustic slime."
Clint's lips twitched slightly. "Have you ever noticed that Cap always seems to assign the fun parts of these things to himself?"
"There's nothing he could have done here that a fireman couldn't do better." Steve didn't have any powers, beyond the heightened endurance and flexibility granted by the supersoldier serum, and he didn't have Tony's engineering knowledge, either. What he did have was a lifetime of combat experience.
"There's nothing I can do here that a fireman couldn't do better."
"You're easy to see, even with all that dust in the air." It wasn't much, as jokes went, and Clint didn't smile again.
"It was stupid to send Wanda with the other team," he said, after a long silence while the distant sounds of the fight by the river echoed over the communications link. The monster's slime was apparently capable of dissolving through Spiderman's webbing. "It would've been nice to have probability on our side, here. Her powers would have been useful."
Carol raised her eyebrows, the field of unstable molecules that held her mask on pulling at them. "Useful? She doesn't even trust them to work safely right now." It had been Wanda herself who insisted that she not be sent in to the disaster site, claiming that she didn't trust her powers so close to central Manhattan.
"She brought me back from the dead, and she healed Cap's broken jaw that time in England. Maybe she could have kept that guy alive."
Carol glanced involuntarily at the shrouded body, then forced herself to look away, back to Clint. "She was already being influenced by Chthon in England. I don't think her powers naturally work that way, or she would have healed people with them a lot more often." And if Chthon's influence was necessary in order to do it, then one person's life wasn't worth the potential consequences.
Clint's usually bright costume was dull grey-violet with dust, and his gloves were scuffed and torn — he'd been pulling people out of the rubble under the fire fighters' direction despite not being trained for it beyond the usual superhero's basic knowledge of rescue techniques. She forgot, most of the time, that he had no powers, not even Steve's minimal healing factor and enhanced physical performance. Clint never let the fact that he was eternally outclassed by almost everyone around him slow him down.
It had gotten him killed once already — Steve, Clint, Tony... her non-powered teammates were frighteningly breakable in some ways.
Of course, so were the powered ones. Hank, Wanda, Vision. Simon, who had died twice. Tony again, who was still deeply fucked up despite his new cybernetic powers, for all that he'd gotten better lately.
There were times when Carol wondered if the role of superhero just inherently attracted fucked up or damaged people, the way adrenaline junkies were automatically attracted to fighter planes. Or maybe most of them had started out normal, and the job itself was what did it. She'd been innocent and normal once, hadn't she? It probably wasn't just the effects of her washed-out memories that made that much younger Carol feel like a different person.
"You're the last person I expected to be this pleased to have her back on the team," she said, the words coming out a little more sarcastically than she had intended. "After what she did to you..." Explicitly mentioning the mind-controlled sex Clint had been subjected to in Transia was not something she was willing to do in a place this public, but he would know what she meant. There were certain things that didn't need to be named — things terrible enough or significant enough that afterwards, 'what he did to you,' or 'what happened in Transia' could only have one possible meaning. "I would have expected Thor to greet Tony with open arms first."
"It wasn't her fault." Clint sounded almost defensive. "I'm lucky she was willing to forgive me."
"Willing to forgive you?" Carol stared at him, appalled. "What on earth did you do to her that needs forgiveness?" She expected this kind of self-recriminating stupidity from Tony, but Clint? How bad a number had Wanda done on his head, for him to blame himself? "You were mind-controlled, Clint."
Clint shook his head. "I left her there," he said, grimly. "I should have gone back for her after the mind control wore off. Even just from a tactical standpoint, it was stupid, even taking what I thought I'd seen at face value — she had enough power left to mindwhammy me, even without her memories, and I just left her there with possibly uncontrolled powers she maybe didn't even know she had?" He gestured vaguely at himself. "What kind of superhero does that make me? Other than a stupid one, I mean."
"Well, yes, but..." that made logical sense, but it didn't feel right. Half a moment later, she belatedly realized why, and the hair on her arms stood up. "No one would have expected you to go back, Clint. If it were me, I don't think I could have. Not if I thought it might happen again." Facing another version of Marcus during Kang's invasion of Earth a few years ago had been hard enough — her skin had crawled every time he'd tried to touch her. Going back to limbo with him would have been an impossibility.
If some supervillain ever made it necessary to send Jessica back into the Shadow King's dimension... Even the thought made her stomach twist and her throat close up.
"Has Tony or Steve told you you should have gone back? Because if they have, I will hurt them."
Clint cringed visibly, his shoulders hunching up. "Thank you for that. God, Chthon could have made me date rape her again if I'd gone back to get her. I hadn't thought of it that way."
Carol glanced around them automatically, half-expecting to see one of the rescued civilians staring at them in horror or prurient interest. This was not the place for this conversation. Few places were, really. And the fight at the docks sounded like it was still going strong — they needed to be there, not here. "I'm pretty sure you were the one who was date raped, from what you told me," she said, keeping her voice low.
Clint waved the idea away, his hand making a hard, jerky motion. "That was when we still thought it was just Wanda with amnesia, before we knew about Chthon." He looked away, down at his torn and grimy gloves. "He wasn't just influencing her by that point; he was controlling her completely." His hands clenched into fists, and his jaw tightened; he looked older, suddenly, more so than he actually was. "She didn't choose any of it, not even subconsciously. Chthon used her body to seduce me like some kind of, of Wanda-puppet. She doesn't even remember it, not really. I don't even know what you call that kind of wrong."
'I didn't want any of this,' Wanda had told her, her anger raw and only partly directed at Carol. 'The last thing I remember is going to find Jen, and Cap says that was weeks before everything else happened.
And 'I wanted someone to stop me. We never seem to notice when one of us needs help.'
She hadn't really thought about what that meant. She hadn't wanted to. Wanda had killed Vision — she'd watched Simon cry for him, for Wanda, watched her team shatter. If it wasn't Wanda's fault, it was all of their faults, for letting her be taken and used.
They'd all let it happen, the same way the rest of the team had let Marcus take her.
"Rape," she said, very quietly. Naming it made it worse, somehow, made it sound dirtier, more pathetic. "You call it rape. Of both of you," she added, quickly, when Clint swallowed hard and took a half-step backward. "That's sick." Jessica had been afraid to sleep, during those first weeks Carol had known her, afraid of what would happen to her in her dreams. Jessica, who was afraid of almost nothing. No wonder Wanda was willing to work with Loki if necessary to keep Chthon away from her. "That's... that thing is evil. I want it destroyed." She surprised herself with how intensely she meant it.
"We can't destroy him." Tony's artificially distorted voice behind her made her stiffen. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Carol should have heard his metal boots scraping against the pavement as he came up behind them, or felt the disruption in the air as he landed.
"Chthon's one of the primal forces of the universe," Tony went on, as Carol and Clint turned to face him. "The best we can do is seal him up again. That's about all you can ever do, sometimes." His helmet angled slightly toward the ambulances then, and he added, almost to himself. "This shouldn't have happened."
"Accidents happen," Clint said. He rubbed one hand against his thigh, raising a small puff of dust. "Sometime the best you can do is damage control."
"No." Tony shook his head, something within his armor whirring faintly. He smelled like hot metal and burned plastic. "This literally shouldn't have happened. The odds of that crane hitting the building at precisely that angle, at exactly the right point to cause the most damage possible, are minuscule, and even if everything went perfectly wrong, it shouldn't have done this. The building shouldn't have been on the verge of total collapse, unless it was loaded with structural flaws to begin with, and the company that was building it has an almost perfect safety record." He held up one hand, ticking points off on the fingers of his gauntlet. "Building collapses, gas main explosions, subway accidents. Do you know how many times two subway trains have collided underground in the entire history of the New York subway?"
"No," Clint said, "but I'm guessing from your tone of voice that it's a small number."
"It's a very small number," Tony confirmed. "It just doesn't happen."
"You think Chthon's causing all this?" She thought of the face on the pavement, leering evilly up at her. That one had to be a coincidence, even if the disaster itself wasn't — it was too pat, too silly and trite not to be.
"I think we need to talk to Strange again," Tony said. "After we get rid of the squid monster."
Over the comlink, she could hear a loud thud, followed by Steve swearing.
"Something I can shoot," Clint said, locking his hands together and stretching his fingers out. "I can't wait."
* * *
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
Can you believe we started writing the very first scene in RR&R exactly six years ago (well, technically, six years and one day). Happy anniversary, fandom ^_^.
Authors:
seanchai and <elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Detailed discussion of (past) mind-control-induced dub-con/non-con in this chapter.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with initial brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
"It's imperative that it not be exposed to direct sunlight," Dr. Thomas said for the third time. "The damage would be irreparable."
"Our scientific consultant has spoken to both your exhibit curator and to several archival preservation and manuscript conservation specialists from the New York Public Library's special collections department at length," Jan said, smiling up at him with publicity-perfect charm. Beside her, Steve was projecting square-jawed trustworthiness for all he was worth.
The Metropolitan Museum's manuscript curator was visibly nervous about entrusting a valuable sixteenth century manuscript to a bunch of costumed superheroes; Sam's careful explanation of the Mansion's security system hadn't reassured him much, which, considering the number of times the place had been attacked, blown-up, set on fire, or otherwise subjected to major structural damage, wasn't surprising.
At the end of the day, Thomas had to answer to the museum's board of trustees, as well as to the donors who had given them the book in the first place. The donors wanted the book to be protected from theft, especially theft by international terrorists, but also wanted it to go back on display as soon as possible, and the trustees were highly skeptical about the existence of any "so called curse" as well as the necessity of having Dr. Strange remove it.
"The Dee manuscript is going to be stored in an airtight, temperature and humidity controlled glass case." Hank's smile was considerably more fixed than Jan's. "It will be kept at 50°F and 49% relative humidity, inside a secure vault. In the dark. You can examine it if you want to."
Dr. Thomas smoothed his hair down with one hand and fixed Hank with a steady, assessing stare. "I would appreciate that. I understand you're a chemist, Dr. Pym?"
"Biochemistry and dimensional physics."
Behind Dr. Thomas, and slightly to his left, one of the museum's assistant curators was carefully cradling the hermetically sealed box that contained the John Dee manuscript. Wanda was hovering at her elbow, staring at the box as if she expected it explode. If he looked closely, Sam almost thought he could see light glowing through the thin material of her gloves.
He would have dismissed it as his imagination, but Redwing had mantled his feathers, let out a steam-whistle scream of offense, and taken off for the sky the moment the museum staff, and their box, had come within twenty feet of him. He had flatly refused Sam's suggestion that he come back down, projecting an impression of fear and disgust, and a mental image of the box distorted into the shape of a giant, evil-looking owl. There is a predator inside that, Sam translated.
"We're glad to help the museum in any way," Steve was saying. "Dr. Strange will examine the book as soon as possible, and we'll get it back to you folks in no time."
"I hope so." The assistant curator shifted her grip on the manuscript box, grimacing slightly, then added, "I'm skeptical about this 'curse,' but the exhibit has been plagued by bad luck since it began, and one of our conservationists swears that it whispered to him when he tried to assess its condition. He's not usually a man given to superstition."
She was around Sam's age, with well-defined muscles in her arms that probably came from hauling manuscripts around, and mid-toned, coppery skin, and had shown no sign of Dr. Thomas's tendency to talk down to them all. Between himself and Hank, Sam had gotten the better end of the bargain.
"I didn't feel anything creepy around it," Sam told her, "but people whose opinions I trust think it's dangerous."
"The attack..." She shook her head. "Supervillains are one thing. Doctor Octopus tried to steal a Vermeer from us right after I first started working for the Met, but nobody's ever come in with guns before. They killed two people. Art thieves don't operate that way. It's not something you-" she broke off, her voice catching, then took a deep breath. "My fiancé keeps trying to get me to move out of New York."
People who weren't from New York always had an exaggerated impression of how dangerous it was — or how dangerous cities in general were. It was a toss-up whether the media liked scary inner-city gang violence or maniacal supervillains more in terms of depicting the city as a dangerous place full of sub-human criminals. Not to mention, "Where else are you going to get to work with a collection like that?"
"The Smithsonian, or the British Museum," she said, matter-of-factly, "but one doesn't have job openings in my field and the other one requires moving to England. Plus, I did an internship at the National Archives right after I finished school. You couldn't pay me money to go back to a DC commute." She shifted the box again, and nodded at Hank and Thomas. "Dr. Thomas is waving at me. I think it's time to go install this in your vault."
The vault had foot-thick steel alloy walls, with half-inch adamantium plating. It was meant to contain dangerous and potentially explosive tech, including Tony, if the Extremis were ever hacked again.
The original Mansion's plans had shown a shielded energy containment room in this location, designed to keep Jack of Heart's powers under control. Sam had never actually seen it, but he'd seen the damage Jack's body had caused — even after death, his flesh had still been charged with energy. Anything that could contain that was overkill to protect a book.
The manuscript case looked lonely and out of place against the sterile metal walls; Jan had lined the bottom in red velvet, like a display case. She'd suggested that they donate the thing to the museum when the book was returned, as a gesture of good will.
It wasn't a bad idea; when Thomas examined the case, his nervousness and general hostility decreased to almost nothing, replaced by stiff professionalism. By the time Hank and Jan were walking him out, he was almost smiling.
They hadn't needed Tony and his prominent donor status to make this go smoothly after all. Just a couple of pretty faces — Steve included — and someone to talk science.
The vault door was heavy enough that it took both Steve and Sam together to haul it shut. If Thor were there, he could have done it singlehandedly, but diplomacy was not his strong suit, and he'd had business in Valhalla.
Sam leaned his weight against the door to make sure it was fully shut while Steve keyed in the electronic lock. It beeped once, then engaged, unaffected by Wanda's presence only a few feet away; Tony had designed it to be resistant to energy fluctuations.
Probably a good thing, considering what they were shutting inside it.
"I can still feel it," Wanda said, frowning at the door. "It's fainter, but it's still there. The vault shielding doesn't block it."
Steve nodded at the door. "Is there anything you can do?"
She shrugged. "I can put some protective sigils around it, but that's not really my specialty."
There was a familiar, whiny "feed me" meow from the doorway, and then the cat padded silently into the room, sneering at Sam on his way to Steve — he and Redwing loathed each other, and he considered Sam to be an extension of Redwing.
Halfway to Steve, the cat froze. For a long, motionless moment, he stared at the vault with his back arched and his tail puffed out like a bottle brush. Then he hissed and streaked out of the room.
"Put on lots of sigils," Sam suggested.
An hour later, Steve was still trying to get the cat to come out from under the living room couch.
"Leave it alone. He'll take your hand off if you stick it under there again."
Steve ignored Sam's advice and stuck his hand back under the couch, causing the cat to make an evil growling sound and retreat even further.
"Come on, Patton," Steve coaxed. "It's okay."
All six-foot-two-inches of Steve were stretched out on the floor, his chin propped on one wrist as he stared under the couch — it was low enough to the floor that his arm only fit under it up to the elbow. It should have been funny, but the sounds of defensive fear coming from the cat made the hair on the back of Sam's neck stand up.
In the back of his head, he could sense Redwing's wary reluctance to return to the Mansion, balanced against the knowledge that Sam and food were both there. Redwing didn't spook easily. Neither did the cat, who had stood his ground against two and a half pounds of pissed off, territorial red-tailed hawk without blinking.
Keeping that book here was a bad idea, and not just because of the insurance disaster it would be if something happened to it while it was in their custody.
'One of our conservationists swears that it whispered to him,' the curator had said. She'd sounded skeptical, but she'd held the box uncomfortably.
Daredevil had heard whispering in the cathedral, before Chthon had influenced a previously law-abiding man into attacking Strange. Wanda had said that she could feel both Chthon and the magic in the book trying to speak to her because of her powers, but magical ability didn't seem to be necessary.
Between Hank, Tony, and Wanda, they had enough unstable people in the house without adding evil chaos magic that spoke to people in their heads to the mix.
The cat made a particularly vicious spitting noise, and Steve jerked his hand out from under the couch, rubbing at a set of nasty-looking scratches that scored the back of his leather glove. "I'm not trying to hurt you, cat," he said, his jaw setting firmly.
Trust Steve to try to lecture a cat. "Have you tried food?" Sam suggested. "It works for Clint."
Steve pushed himself up to his knees, brushing a scattering of orange fur off the front of his costume. "Wanda, your arms are smaller than mine. Do you want to-"
"No," she said, firmly. She eyed the couch warily, and added, "I don't blame him. I don't like having that book in the house, Cap. We need Strange here as soon as possible."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "I know. I couldn't get any answer from him when I called, or from Wong." Calling Strange was a shot in the dark at the best of times, since he rarely carried a cell phone and often spent months away from home. He also seemed to regard the internet with a baffled and vaguely intimidated disinterest that Sam didn't expect from someone who usually seemed convinced of his own omniscience.
Wanda arched an eyebrow. "Did you try asking the Night Nurse? I think the two of them are involved."
"Jan thinks so too," Steve said. "So yes, we did. She said he and Wong are in another dimension. It's got something to do with Dormammu, and weaknesses in the dimensional walls around Manhattan. Apparently, Chthon's toe-hold in the city is like a giant, inter-dimensional beacon to all kinds of nasty things straight out of HP Lovecraft's nightmares."
Wanda's lips tightened, and she looks away, rubbing at the back of one hand. "I didn't think of that. I'm the one who brought him here."
That was bullshit, and Sam said as much. "You didn't choose to come here. There's only so much you can do when you're being mind-controlled, it's hard enough just to fight the control off. And there's no point in blaming anyone now, anyway; what's done is done." If there was one thing about his fellow Avengers that irritated him — and when had he started thinking of them as 'fellow Avengers?' He'd intended to join the team only temporarily, had no more intention of being their long-term token anti-Registration hero than he'd once had of being their 'token minority guy' — it was the way so many of them seemed to spend half their time feeling guilty for the wrong things.
Steve might be capable of prolonged sulking fits and epic cases of missing the point, but he didn't wallow in guilt or self-pity.
"It's nobody's fault," Steve said firmly.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of orange-furred movement under the couch. The cat had crept forward while they were talking, now that Steve was no longer poking at him.
Sam dropped to the floor and reached under the couch, grabbing for the scruff of his neck. The cat squawked, and tried to bite him, raking Sam's forearm with his back feet. It was nothing compared to the damage Redwing could do to his arms and shoulders without even trying, especially not through a long-sleeved shirt, so he ignored the needle-sharp caws and hauled the cat out, handing it up to Steve. "Here. Maybe he'll feel safer if you take him to the other end of the mansion."
"I was planning to." Steve cradled the cat against his chest, not seeming to care that it was currently wrapped around his arm, kicking and biting and making vaguely demonic sounds.
"You aren't good with cats," Sam observed. "Remember that time you kept your neighbor's cat for a week and it ran every time it saw you coming?"
Steve shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed. "It was afraid of my shield."
Probably, Sam reflected, because Steve had a habit of throwing his shield indoors when he was bored, something that he couldn't blame any self-respecting cat for objecting to. Sharing an apartment with Steve had been an exercise in broken lamps, cracked picture frames, and arguing over the radio — Steve had refused to listen to anything recorded after about 1960 that wasn't by the Rat Pack, which Sam suspected had been done out of a deliberate desire to be irritating. Sam had retaliated by spending entire days speaking in 70s and 80s slang he knew Steve had never heard of.
They'd been remarkably stupid in their twenties.
"Just give him some cat treats and leave him alone" he said. "It works with Redwing."
Wanda reached out to poke tentatively at one of the cat's front feet, then snatched her hand back as he swiped at her. "He has an extra toe on his front foot. I never noticed that before." Then, to the cat, "Hello, kitty, are you a mutant too? Yes, you are. An angry mutant."
Sam exchanged glances with Steve, and saw his own amusement reflected in Steve's expression. "I'd say something about girls and animals," he said, "but Hawkeye talks to it the same way."
Wanda pulled her hand, half extended to touch the cat, back again. "I always wanted a kitten when I was little," she said, a touch of defensiveness in her voice, "but we weren't allowed to have them because they're dirty."
"They wash themselves all the time," Steve objected, his eyebrows going up skeptically.
"Yes," Wanda said. "With their tongues."
When you looked at it that way, it did sound kind of disgusting. "I never had pets growing up either," Sam offered. "The superintendent in our apartment building hated them."
"Neither did I." The cat gave one more high-pitched growl then subsided into long-suffering silence, clearly having given up. Steve scratched it behind one ear with a gloved finger. "See, if you hold him long enough, he eventually calms down."
Wanda rubbed the cat's other ear, carefully, then smiled when he leaned his head into her hand. "The book will be gone soon, kitty," she told him. "I won't let it hurt you." She paused for a second, stroking the six-toed foot splayed against Steve's scale-mail. "I'm glad I didn't hurt you," she added.
What was she — Then it hit Sam. Something like ninety-eight percent of human mutations had nothing to do with the X gene. All of them had been unaffected by M-Day; Wanda's power had clearly been going by Chthon's intent, rather than a literal application of her words.
'No more mutants,' taken literally, could have completely halted evolution, going by what Sam remembered from high school biology. Or erased most of the human population from existence — just about everybody had some kind of mutation, from blue eyes, to sickle cell disease, to cats with six toes.
Reality altering powers were something Sam preferred not to think about too hard — the broader implications were too disturbing. One little nudge at reality, and your entire life could be rewritten, huge chunks of your past erased or replaced. Powers could be given to you or taken away again, just like that. One wish spoken by the wrong person could change who you were.
Tony claimed to be able to remember parts of his life in the alternate universe Reed Richard's kid had created. Wanda could remember bits and pieces of Magneto's mutant-dominated alternate reality. Sam had had two sets of memories long before either of those.
"It's not your fault," Steve said, to Wanda. "Like I said, if we blamed everyone on the team who'd ever been mind-controlled for what they did under mind-control, we'd have to court-martial pretty much everybody except Jan."
"Don't push our luck." Sam bent down and made a show of knocking on the edge of the coffee table. "If you say that too many times, Jan will be next."
Wanda's lips twitched, but then she sobered, the smile vanishing before it had fully formed. "It might not be my fault, but knowing that won't bring Vision back." She tried to smile again, but this time it was visibly forced. "He liked cats, too. We talked about getting one from the humane society, but then I got pregnant, and a new pet plus two babies would have been too much to handle."
It felt like he ought to say something, but Sam couldn't think what. 'I'm sorry,' or 'I know how you feel,' or any of the other platitudes people handed out after someone died were more for the sake of courtesy than anything else. 'You've never watched your best friend be gunned down right in front of you, so no, you don't know how I feel,' was not a response people were equipped to handle, either.
Steve shifted the cat to one arm, and reached back to rub at his neck with his free hand. "I'll try calling Linda again," he said awkwardly. "Maybe Strange is back now." He turned to go, and Wanda reached for his arm.
"Let me call her. I know Stephen better than you do."
Sam left them to it, and went outside to see if he could get his own frightened animal companion to calm down — Redwing's agitation was a continual presence in his mind, making him feel edgy, and his own thoughts about reality and memories weren't helping.
He shoved the worries aside with an effort, and spent the next ten minutes coaxing Redwing down off the roof of a neighboring building.
It was nearly nine, dinner had been over an hour ago, and where the hell was Tony? The last thing Steve had heard from him had been via Maria Hill, when she'd called to deliver a curt message that Tony had "discovered information which confirms that Sin is working with Victor von Doom." Then, when Steve had tried to ask questions, she'd hung up.
Taking a piece of vital tactical information and dropping completely out of contact with it for hours wasn't like Tony. Or rather, it was, but when Tony decided to keep something to himself because he was certain he could deal it on his own, he tended to keep everyone he knew completely in the dark about it. He certainly didn't tell the command staff of SHIELD and have them call the Avengers.
Steve kicked the door to their room closed behind him, and let himself drop backward onto the bed, arms flung out. Tony was fine. Sharon or Bucky would have called him if Maya's examination had gone badly.
He was fine. He was just being an uncommunicative jackass, because some business deal or other at Stark Enterprises, defragmenting his armor, or redesigning SE's tablet computer from the ground up because the patent infringement case had suddenly turned in HP's favor, was so important that he'd lost track of time.
It wasn't unusual for Tony to do that. Steve firmly squashed the thought that Tony could easily have used the Extremis to call him at any point, without even the need for access to a phone; he'd spent weeks trying to get Tony to use the Extremis less frequently, and just because it would be more convenient for him right now if Tony used it didn't mean it couldn't hurt him.
He'd been completely worn out by it yesterday afternoon, when Steve had found him lying on the bed in the dark, obviously suffering from another headache. This time, it had been bad enough that he'd actually confessed to overdoing it and agreed to talk to Maya.
Steve stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of all the things that might be going wrong with the Extremis in order to cause those headaches, or all the potential non-work-related reasons for why Tony hadn't come home yet or called.
He felt restless, twitchy, the kind of useless, jumpy energy he usually burned off by going for a run or working out, but a hand-to-hand workout with Sam earlier hadn't made a dent in it.
Sam had been on edge, too, throwing himself into the practice with a little too much enthusiasm. Because of the John Donne manuscript, probably. He and Wanda were both uneasy about it, and they still hadn't managed to get Strange on the phone.
And Hank was spending far too much time walled up in his lab, between the containment unit for that damn book, and whatever genetics project he was working on with Beast. He was probably trying to avoid Thor, but now he'd started asking the other Avengers for blood samples, and Steve wasn't looking forward to the explosion that was going to come when Thor heard about it.
And the newspaper articles about himself and Tony were still coming out. When Jarvis had started screening or blocking all calls from the media, they'd started calling the West Coast and badgering Henry Hellrung instead, trying to get him to tell them the juicy details of his possibly hypothetical fling with Tony. Steve had carefully not asked Tony if there was any truth to the rumors, because he would undoubtedly have to work with Hellrung in the future, and having too much knowledge of anything that had happened between them would make that awkward. The tabloids seemed hell-bent on ruining Steve's deliberate ignorance, though.
At least Sally Floyd had apologized for breaking the story without telling them, though she'd put most of the blame on Tony for not answering his phone.
That seemed to be a habit of his recently.
Steve checked his watch, found that only seven minutes had passed since the last time he'd checked it, and sighed. Calling Tony's office again would only get him an answering machine at this time of night, and contacting him via the Avengers communicator built into the armor would be an abuse of team communications equipment.
Thirteen minutes later, Tony appeared in the doorway.
'He looks tired,' was Steve's first thought. The dark smudges under his eyes that had been there this morning were deeper now, and his hair was a mess. His white dress shirt was crumpled and smeared with grease and machine oil, and there was a dark streak — probably more oil — down the side of his face.
He hadn't been doing something for SE. He'd been elbow deep in a quinjet engine, or overhauling the armor.
Steve's worry vanished in the heat of irritation. "Where have you been all day?" he demanded, sitting up with a jerk. "Sub-director Hill wouldn't give me anything other than that Doom and Sin are working together. You can't find out something like that and then go to radio silence for hours."
Tony's expression didn't flicker, which somehow made Steve only want to yell at him louder, in the hopes that maybe shouting would sink in where plain old annoyance had not. He stepped into the room, closing the door behind him, and turned to face Steve. "I've been building an electromagnetic jammer to block Doom's teleportation device," he said quietly. "Someone using it can still teleport into a space where the jammer signal is being broadcast, but they can't leave."
"That's... good, I guess." Actually, it was potentially very useful, but building it hadn't required Tony to hide all day. "We should have figured this out days ago," he added, feeling a flash of irritation at himself as well. "It all makes sense now. Sin's never had any interest in magic, but Doom's been after Loki's spear for months now. It's too much of a coincidence for a book with spells for summoning chaos entities to be stolen while Chthon is in the city and for the two of them to have nothing to do with one another." In hindsight, the likelihood of Doom's involvement was almost painfully obvious. Why had none of them seen it?
Too many distractions, he decided. First Wanda's return, then that damn magazine article, not to mention the onslaught of disasters and petty supervillain attacks that had run them all ragged for weeks. Was Chthon doing it on purpose? Did he have that much influence yet, or was it just a side effect of how thin the barrier between dimensions had become inside St. Margaret's, the bad luck that followed Chthon seeping out and working in Doom's favor?
Tony rubbed one hand over his face, smearing the engine grease even further. "We need to have Wanda take a look at that book; we can't afford to wait until Strange gets back from wherever he's run off to. Doom wouldn't waste his time on it if it weren't useful to him."
Steve nodded; Doom could devote himself to a goal with a single-minded intensity that was frightening, the same vanity that had prompted him to hide his face behind a mask making him refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of failure.
The book contained spells for summoning 'angels and demons,' according to the description the assistant manuscript curator had given Sam. Could one of those be modified to summon Loki's spear right out of the cathedral, or call up something Doom could send in to fetch it? Strange's binding spell kept Doom himself from physically entering the building as long as Daredevil lived, but maybe Doom had discovered some kind of loophole.
"Redwing and Patton won't go near it," he said.
Tony made an absent noise, then started to pace back and forth at the end of the bed, left hand rubbing at his temple.
Was that a sign of another headache, or was he just thinking? Steve couldn't tell anymore, and that worried him.
He was preparing to pointedly ask if Tony was all right when Tony stopped abruptly, his back to Steve. "We can talk about Doom later," he said, a note in his voice that would have sounded dismissive if Steve hadn't known him well enough to recognize the tiredness behind it. His shoulders had stiffened, the weary slump of moments before gone. "I talked to Maya," he added, then fell silent.
Steve waited for more, and when it didn't come, made himself ask. "What did she say?"
Tony sighed. He still wasn't looking at Steve, wasn't even facing him. "You're not going to like it."
A sinking feeling in his stomach, Steve got to his feet. "It involves the Extremis, so I'm sure I won't. What is it?"
For a long moment, Tony said nothing, and Steve's stomach sank even further.
He wasn't sure what he'd been hoping for — that there would, in fact, turn out to be a problem with the Extremis and it would be something they could fix, after which the headaches would go away, or that there would be nothing wrong with it, and Maya would give Tony orders to use it less that he would actually listen to. The former. The former would have meant that Tony wasn't subconsciously doing this to himself, and that there was an easy solution. That he wasn't using the Extremis just as heavily as always and lying to Steve about trying to cut back.
Tony drew in a deep breath, and when he spoke, it was in the same cool, distant tone Steve had heard him use on television after the Helicarrier had exploded. "The Mandarin's rings introduced a bug into the Extremis, corrupted part of the code. The healing factor isn't working properly, which is why the headaches are back. Until the coding is repaired, using it causes damage, so I'm going to be less useful in the field for a little while."
"Damaged," Steve repeated slowly. "What kind of damage?"
"It doesn't matter," Tony said, so calmly that Steve felt a hot flare of anger at him. "All we have to do is fix the Extremis and it will go away."
Tony always thought he could fix things, that everything had to have an obvious, neat solution if only he were smart enough to see it and could control enough variables to put said solution into effect, preferably while telling as few people as possible. Sometimes his attempts at damage control caused even more problems than the thing he was trying to fix. Work with the government to mitigate the effects of Registration, co-operate with Loki, break the law and flatten everyone in his path to steal his stolen technology back. Shoot himself up with experimental nanotechnology to take out a monster who'd been created by the same process.
And he still wasn't looking at Steve, wasn't even facing him.
Tony wasn't going to hold this conversation with his back to Steve. He reached out, grabbed Tony by the shoulder — the solid bone and muscle beneath his fingers felt healthy, part of his mind noted, normal — and jerked him around. "What kind of damage?"
Tony's eyes narrowed, his muscles tensing, and then he relaxed again; Steve had the feeling he'd forced himself to do so. He met Steve's eyes, and said, with an attempt at a smile, "Don't worry; it's not as bad as you're thinking."
"And how bad is that?" Tony didn't look sick, hadn't seemed sick, aside from the headaches. Had there been other symptoms, ones Steve had missed? How much had he been hiding?
Tony shook his head fractionally, reaching up to lay his fingers over Steve's, still wrapped around his shoulder. "Damage was the wrong word. It's not going to do anything to me, Steve. It just hurts when I use it, and until the problem is fixed, it's going to keep hurting. Maya thinks the migraines might get worse, and there might be some other, minor side effects. It's not a big deal, just an inconvenience."
They were standing only inches apart, in what probably would have looked like a romantic pose to anyone who walked into the room — he could smell the oil staining Tony's clothes, overpowering the faint metallic scent that he always seemed to carry around with him these days. Normally, being this close to a disheveled, grease-stained Tony would have made it hard to think about anything but sex, but right now, all he could feel was relief. And irritation. Relief that Tony wasn't seriously ill, despite his momentary fears, a tight irritation at Tony for refusing to listen to everything Steve had been saying about the Extremis all along, and an irrational desire to shake Tony and snarl at him for making him worry with all this drama.
Saying 'I told you so,' would be petty. Steve lifted his hand from Tony's shoulder, letting it fall back to his side. "You could barely move last night. I think the side effects are pretty bad already."
Tony shrugged slightly. "So I'm going to have to try not to use it for anything but running the armor for a few weeks, until we figure out a solution. I know this is a bad time to have me running at less than full capacity," he went on, not giving Steve even a moment's pause in which to respond, "but we got by before I had the Extremis. I can function just fine in a fight without it. I won't be able to monitor data from the cathedral or the NYPD or anything else continually like I've been doing but that's what we have Hank for." Another practiced smile, and his fingers tightened gently on Steve's arm before letting go. "Maybe it'll even keep him busy enough to stop walking around muttering to himself about genetics and Nobel prizes; working on the storage unit for the book kept him out of trouble for a couple of days."
"You should-"
"I'm not dropping down from active duty," Tony added fiercely, "so don't even suggest it. It's not an option right now, not while Doom and Sin and Chthon are all out there."
It was true, damn him.
Very dryly, Steve said, "If I ordered you to, you'd ignore me." He was probably going to ignore his own stated plan to use the Extremis only to run the armor, too. The first time being able to access a computer or security camera or satellite transmission in his head was faster and more convenient than doing it the old fashioned way, Tony would tough it out and do things manually. The tenth time, or the first time they needed information or access to a building's security network immediately in the middle of a fight with something, all good intentions would be forgotten.
Tony offered him what was probably supposed to be an encouraging smile. "We're going to fix it. Maya's working on it right now." Steve wasn't sure if he was trying to reassure him or himself.
"And if you can't fix it, what are you going to do?"
Tony winced. "Get used to being obsolete. But it's not going to come to that."
Of course not. Tony had never met a computer program or piece of machinery he couldn't fix, and if he ever did, he'd never admit to it.
Tony came a step closer to him, one hand coming up to touch the side of Steve's face. "I swear, I did not do this on purpose." He stared into Steve's eyes, expression uncertain. His eyes were a clear, bright blue, shading to darker grey around the pupils, no hint of oily Extremis black. Steve felt a sudden urge to wipe the smudge of grease on his face away, to clean all traces of SE and his workshop off of him.
"Why would you-" he started, and then felt a chill as he remembered Tony's face that night on the Helicarrier, when Steve had accused him of being suicidal.
Tony had worked his way through a laundry list of unhealthy behaviors in the past out of some warped need to punish himself. Had tried, both subconsciously and deliberately, to hurt himself with alcohol, with recklessness, by running the clock on his breastplate or artificial heart down to the last handful of seconds over and over.
It hadn't even occurred to Steve that he would still be doing it. Not intentionally, anyway. He'd sworn he was getting better. He had been getting better.
He wrapped his arms around Tony, tightly enough that he knew it probably hurt, and buried his face in Tony's shoulder. The prickly hair of Tony's goatee scraped against his skin, and his shirt smelled like oil and some kind of eye-watering industrial solvent. Steve closed his eyes, and didn't pull away. "I believe you."
"I know this is my own fault, but I really didn't mean for it to happen." One of Tony's hands rubbed up and down Steve's back. "I won't let it be a liability for the team. I promised Wanda I'd be there if Chthon got her again, and I promised you—"
"Promise me you won't do anything to make this worse," Steve interrupted. It was supposed to be an order, but came out sounding like something entirely different.
Tony's hands slid under his shirt, cool against his skin, and his touch was suddenly anything but soothing. "Of course not. I don't actually enjoy being in pain."
There were moments when Steve doubted that, but saying wouldn't do any good. Neither would getting angry, which was impossible anyway when Tony was touching him that way.
Steve kissed him, hard, then made himself pull back and be gentle. Tony didn't look sick, didn't feel sick — part of him, in fact, felt very aggressively healthy — but the memory of Tony curled into a tight ball on the bed, eyes screwed shut in pain and dried blood under his fingernails, was still vivid.
"I will pull you from active duty if I see you using the Extremis," he said into Tony's skin, as he started unbuttoning Tony's shirt. It was a promise, not a threat. "And to hell with Chthon. You'll be a liability if you end up in such bad shape that you can't take care of yourself in the field."
"You say the most romantic things," Tony said, and grabbed for Steve with enough force that all attempts to be slow and gentle went out the window.
They landed on the bed hard, with Tony on top, and Steve spared a moment to be grateful that they had tested its structural integrity thoroughly. A less well-built piece of furniture wouldn't have taken kindly to having four hundred pounds abruptly dropped on top of it.
Then he didn't do any more thinking for a long time.
The air was thick with dust, and her eyes kept tearing up. Carol tried to use the back of her arm to wipe some of the fine, grey and white powder out of her eyes, and only succeeded in making it worse. There were times when she seriously considered adding goggles to her costume, regardless of how silly they would look.
"Just keep holding that girder in place," Tony's voice crackled over her communicator. "I'm welding the support strut back into place. Once I'm done, you should be able to let go without the wall collapsing."
The floor beneath Carol vibrated slightly as a twenty-foot-tall Jan, propping up the West side of the building from the outside, turned her head to the side and coughed into her upper arm. "Weld faster," the other woman choked out.
Until nine thirty this morning, the unstable disaster area Carol and Jan were currently keeping from total collapse by main strength had been a nearly completed condominium, one of those modern ones with white walls and lots of big, glass windows. Most of the glass was currently covering either the warped and buckled floors or the street and sidewalk below; nearly all the windows on the building's north and west sides had shattered when the crane being used to complete the roof had collapsed and crashed straight through the top of the building.
The crane had sheared off part of the building's seventh, eighth, and ninth stories when it fell, finally coming to a stop in the rubble of the partially collapsed fifth and sixth floors. It was still in place, a massive piece of twisted metal that pierced through two stories, lashed into place with sticky white webbing — Spiderman's new organic webbing was stronger than the artificially produced substance he'd apparently used before, and he'd covered both the crane and a wide swath of the building's crumbling outer façade in it.
"If I try to do this any faster, the metal's temperature will increase beyond-"
"I can't hold this forever, Tony. My strength increases proportionally with my height, but this is a very big building."
Carol gritted her teeth, held the twisted steel I-beam in her hands steady — it required her to float just under the ceiling, with nothing to brace herself against — and silently echoed Jan's urgings for Tony to get on with it.
Thirty blocks to the south, something extremely large and possessed of a lot of tentacles had crawled out of the Hudson River and begun attacking lower Manhattan. Steve, Thor, and Wanda had managed to hold it off while the rest of the Avengers pulled construction workers and a handful of building staff and early move-ins out of the upper stories of the condo, but even now that Sam had flown south to join them, they were still having no success at driving it back into the river. The sooner they could get this place stable and leave the rest of the clean-up to the city, the better.
Going by the radio chatter that kept intruding on Carol's concentration, the tentacle monster secreted some kind of acidic slime. And had barbed suction cups on the undersides of its dozen arms. Carol breathed through her mouth, trying not to sneeze at the haze of plaster dust in the air, and reflected that it probably said something about her that that sounded like a more appealing challenge than this.
Where was Jen when you needed her? Or Henry and Simon — another pair of flyers would have been useful about twenty minutes ago. Even if one of them was a bland superhero wannabee who'd gotten his powers as part of a publicity stunt.
They were supposed to be temporary, but it was looking more and more as if Henry's flight powers, at least, were going to stick permanently. He'd actually looked kind of spooked when the Initiative scientists had explained that — it had made Carol like him just a little bit more.
"The police have gotten all the evacuees thirty feet away from the building," Clint said, via the comlink, cutting through Hank's babbling about tentacles and secretions. "As soon as Tony or one of the construction engineers gives the word, Jan can take off and join the monster fighting fun."
Jan coughed into her arm again. "I'll bring you back a sample of the slime, honey," she said, which cued another round of distracting babble from Hank, mostly speculation about what role the pollutants still layered in with the Hudson River mud had played in the creature's creation.
"Cute, aren't they?" Carol commented, tone dry as she could keep it while holding up several tons of brick and mortar.
"You get used to it." She could nearly hear Clint's shrug. "Hank doesn't like sitting stuff out; I think he thinks of this as helping."
"Mayhap he can help on a closed channel with Iron Man." Thor's voice, deep enough to feel in her bones even through a comlink.
"Can we pay less attention to the peanut gallery and more attention to the, ah, thing?" Steve sounded slightly annoyed. Carol sympathized.
The weight of the steel beam abruptly lessened, something else taking over the job of supporting it. "Got it," Tony said. "You can let go now, Carol. You too, Jan. The building should hold until they bring a demolition crew in to take the rest of it down properly."
"About time." Carol let go and floated back from the beam, rolling her shoulders to try and work the strain out of them. She resisted the temptation to rub at her eyes — her hands were too covered in debris for that to do anything but make things worse.
The building shuddered perceptibly as Jan stopped leaning her weight against the damaged wall, and Carol held her breath; if Tony said it would hold, it would probably hold, but the first few moments after the building settled felt very long. Thirty feet between the civilians and a potential collapse would be enough to save lives, but it was a narrow enough safety margin to be risky. People would get hurt, if Tony hadn't judged this properly, or if some unseen bit of damage made his calculations useless.
"I'm on my way, Cap." Jan's voice was clearly audible through the sheared-off break in the wall, the tinny comlink echo creating a weird Doppler effect. The ground shook slightly as she moved away, her footsteps loud and solid enough for Carol to feel them in her bones.
Carol ducked out through the hole in the wall, and let herself drop back down to the sidewalk. The ground below her was covered in glass shards and broken bits of rubble; from the air, they formed a pattern vaguely like a face, with narrowed eyes, and a gaping, grinning mouth.
She shook off fanciful thoughts and looked for a safe place to land, somewhere where she wouldn't be ankle-deep in debris.
There, near the edge of the glass's shatter radius; the imaginary face's left eye was formed by a patch of clear asphalt. Carol touched down, and glanced around for Clint — then saw him, a flash of purple by one of the ambulances.
Clint was surrounded by a small cluster of people, patting a short, grey-haired woman awkwardly on the shoulder as she sobbed into her hands. She had just lost a newly purchased apartment that had probably been close to a million-dollar investment, along with everything of hers that had been in it; what did you say to someone like that? 'I'm sorry everything you own was destroyed, but at least you're still alive?'
Clint was welcome to deal with her, and with all the other dusty and shell-shocked residents and construction workers. She didn't envy him.
Beyond Clint, two men in torn and bloody denim work-shirts were sitting on the ground, while emergency workers tended their injuries. One of them was holding a cellphone to his ear with the arm not currently swathed in bloody gauze, talking in soft, hoarse Spanish. He'd been trapped under a chunk of concrete on the fifth floor — she and Sam had pulled him out.
Beside him, a third man was stretched full-length on the asphalt, a sheet pulled over his face to hide it from the circling news copters. They had pulled him out, too, from under the same piece of rubble. He'd been alive, then.
The man with the cellphone was crying, too; she could hear it in his voice.
This hadn't been a supervillain attack. No one had made the crane collapse with powers or explosives and malicious intent; no one had tried to hurt any of these people, not on purpose. It had been pure bad luck and faulty equipment.
The lack of someone to blame didn't make that body under the white sheet feel any less like a failure. His chest had been crushed the moment the rubble hit him, and five or ten minutes either way would have made little difference, but he had been breathing when she had lifted that chunk of curtain wall off him, and he wasn't now.
You couldn't save everyone, no matter how good you were or how many powers you had.
She heard the scrape of a boot heel on pavement behind her, and turned to find Clint at her elbow. "They said he would have died anyway," he said quietly. "There wasn't anything you and Sam could have done."
The wind was cold, much colder than LA, but at least the air out here was clear. A strand of hair lashed at her eyes, catching on the edge of her mask, and Carol shoved it away with the back of her hand. "Just think, we could have spent the past half hour fighting something with twelve tentacles that oozes caustic slime."
Clint's lips twitched slightly. "Have you ever noticed that Cap always seems to assign the fun parts of these things to himself?"
"There's nothing he could have done here that a fireman couldn't do better." Steve didn't have any powers, beyond the heightened endurance and flexibility granted by the supersoldier serum, and he didn't have Tony's engineering knowledge, either. What he did have was a lifetime of combat experience.
"There's nothing I can do here that a fireman couldn't do better."
"You're easy to see, even with all that dust in the air." It wasn't much, as jokes went, and Clint didn't smile again.
"It was stupid to send Wanda with the other team," he said, after a long silence while the distant sounds of the fight by the river echoed over the communications link. The monster's slime was apparently capable of dissolving through Spiderman's webbing. "It would've been nice to have probability on our side, here. Her powers would have been useful."
Carol raised her eyebrows, the field of unstable molecules that held her mask on pulling at them. "Useful? She doesn't even trust them to work safely right now." It had been Wanda herself who insisted that she not be sent in to the disaster site, claiming that she didn't trust her powers so close to central Manhattan.
"She brought me back from the dead, and she healed Cap's broken jaw that time in England. Maybe she could have kept that guy alive."
Carol glanced involuntarily at the shrouded body, then forced herself to look away, back to Clint. "She was already being influenced by Chthon in England. I don't think her powers naturally work that way, or she would have healed people with them a lot more often." And if Chthon's influence was necessary in order to do it, then one person's life wasn't worth the potential consequences.
Clint's usually bright costume was dull grey-violet with dust, and his gloves were scuffed and torn — he'd been pulling people out of the rubble under the fire fighters' direction despite not being trained for it beyond the usual superhero's basic knowledge of rescue techniques. She forgot, most of the time, that he had no powers, not even Steve's minimal healing factor and enhanced physical performance. Clint never let the fact that he was eternally outclassed by almost everyone around him slow him down.
It had gotten him killed once already — Steve, Clint, Tony... her non-powered teammates were frighteningly breakable in some ways.
Of course, so were the powered ones. Hank, Wanda, Vision. Simon, who had died twice. Tony again, who was still deeply fucked up despite his new cybernetic powers, for all that he'd gotten better lately.
There were times when Carol wondered if the role of superhero just inherently attracted fucked up or damaged people, the way adrenaline junkies were automatically attracted to fighter planes. Or maybe most of them had started out normal, and the job itself was what did it. She'd been innocent and normal once, hadn't she? It probably wasn't just the effects of her washed-out memories that made that much younger Carol feel like a different person.
"You're the last person I expected to be this pleased to have her back on the team," she said, the words coming out a little more sarcastically than she had intended. "After what she did to you..." Explicitly mentioning the mind-controlled sex Clint had been subjected to in Transia was not something she was willing to do in a place this public, but he would know what she meant. There were certain things that didn't need to be named — things terrible enough or significant enough that afterwards, 'what he did to you,' or 'what happened in Transia' could only have one possible meaning. "I would have expected Thor to greet Tony with open arms first."
"It wasn't her fault." Clint sounded almost defensive. "I'm lucky she was willing to forgive me."
"Willing to forgive you?" Carol stared at him, appalled. "What on earth did you do to her that needs forgiveness?" She expected this kind of self-recriminating stupidity from Tony, but Clint? How bad a number had Wanda done on his head, for him to blame himself? "You were mind-controlled, Clint."
Clint shook his head. "I left her there," he said, grimly. "I should have gone back for her after the mind control wore off. Even just from a tactical standpoint, it was stupid, even taking what I thought I'd seen at face value — she had enough power left to mindwhammy me, even without her memories, and I just left her there with possibly uncontrolled powers she maybe didn't even know she had?" He gestured vaguely at himself. "What kind of superhero does that make me? Other than a stupid one, I mean."
"Well, yes, but..." that made logical sense, but it didn't feel right. Half a moment later, she belatedly realized why, and the hair on her arms stood up. "No one would have expected you to go back, Clint. If it were me, I don't think I could have. Not if I thought it might happen again." Facing another version of Marcus during Kang's invasion of Earth a few years ago had been hard enough — her skin had crawled every time he'd tried to touch her. Going back to limbo with him would have been an impossibility.
If some supervillain ever made it necessary to send Jessica back into the Shadow King's dimension... Even the thought made her stomach twist and her throat close up.
"Has Tony or Steve told you you should have gone back? Because if they have, I will hurt them."
Clint cringed visibly, his shoulders hunching up. "Thank you for that. God, Chthon could have made me date rape her again if I'd gone back to get her. I hadn't thought of it that way."
Carol glanced around them automatically, half-expecting to see one of the rescued civilians staring at them in horror or prurient interest. This was not the place for this conversation. Few places were, really. And the fight at the docks sounded like it was still going strong — they needed to be there, not here. "I'm pretty sure you were the one who was date raped, from what you told me," she said, keeping her voice low.
Clint waved the idea away, his hand making a hard, jerky motion. "That was when we still thought it was just Wanda with amnesia, before we knew about Chthon." He looked away, down at his torn and grimy gloves. "He wasn't just influencing her by that point; he was controlling her completely." His hands clenched into fists, and his jaw tightened; he looked older, suddenly, more so than he actually was. "She didn't choose any of it, not even subconsciously. Chthon used her body to seduce me like some kind of, of Wanda-puppet. She doesn't even remember it, not really. I don't even know what you call that kind of wrong."
'I didn't want any of this,' Wanda had told her, her anger raw and only partly directed at Carol. 'The last thing I remember is going to find Jen, and Cap says that was weeks before everything else happened.
And 'I wanted someone to stop me. We never seem to notice when one of us needs help.'
She hadn't really thought about what that meant. She hadn't wanted to. Wanda had killed Vision — she'd watched Simon cry for him, for Wanda, watched her team shatter. If it wasn't Wanda's fault, it was all of their faults, for letting her be taken and used.
They'd all let it happen, the same way the rest of the team had let Marcus take her.
"Rape," she said, very quietly. Naming it made it worse, somehow, made it sound dirtier, more pathetic. "You call it rape. Of both of you," she added, quickly, when Clint swallowed hard and took a half-step backward. "That's sick." Jessica had been afraid to sleep, during those first weeks Carol had known her, afraid of what would happen to her in her dreams. Jessica, who was afraid of almost nothing. No wonder Wanda was willing to work with Loki if necessary to keep Chthon away from her. "That's... that thing is evil. I want it destroyed." She surprised herself with how intensely she meant it.
"We can't destroy him." Tony's artificially distorted voice behind her made her stiffen. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Carol should have heard his metal boots scraping against the pavement as he came up behind them, or felt the disruption in the air as he landed.
"Chthon's one of the primal forces of the universe," Tony went on, as Carol and Clint turned to face him. "The best we can do is seal him up again. That's about all you can ever do, sometimes." His helmet angled slightly toward the ambulances then, and he added, almost to himself. "This shouldn't have happened."
"Accidents happen," Clint said. He rubbed one hand against his thigh, raising a small puff of dust. "Sometime the best you can do is damage control."
"No." Tony shook his head, something within his armor whirring faintly. He smelled like hot metal and burned plastic. "This literally shouldn't have happened. The odds of that crane hitting the building at precisely that angle, at exactly the right point to cause the most damage possible, are minuscule, and even if everything went perfectly wrong, it shouldn't have done this. The building shouldn't have been on the verge of total collapse, unless it was loaded with structural flaws to begin with, and the company that was building it has an almost perfect safety record." He held up one hand, ticking points off on the fingers of his gauntlet. "Building collapses, gas main explosions, subway accidents. Do you know how many times two subway trains have collided underground in the entire history of the New York subway?"
"No," Clint said, "but I'm guessing from your tone of voice that it's a small number."
"It's a very small number," Tony confirmed. "It just doesn't happen."
"You think Chthon's causing all this?" She thought of the face on the pavement, leering evilly up at her. That one had to be a coincidence, even if the disaster itself wasn't — it was too pat, too silly and trite not to be.
"I think we need to talk to Strange again," Tony said. "After we get rid of the squid monster."
Over the comlink, she could hear a loud thud, followed by Steve swearing.
"Something I can shoot," Clint said, locking his hands together and stretching his fingers out. "I can't wait."
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
Can you believe we started writing the very first scene in RR&R exactly six years ago (well, technically, six years and one day). Happy anniversary, fandom ^_^.
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Oh, and happy anniversary.
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Loved the parts with Sam and If there was one thing about his fellow Avengers that irritated him — and when had he started thinking of them as 'fellow Avengers?' He'd intended to join the team only temporarily, had no more intention of being their long-term token anti-Registration hero than he'd once had of being their 'token minority guy' — it was the way so many of them seemed to spend half their time feeling guilty for the wrong things.
And his remembering him and Steve being dumb in their 20s (aw) and having 2 sets of memories.
Remembering about poor Jack of Heart's containment room and re-using it for this!
I'm sure if Tony won't mention the specifics of the "damage," it's because there's nothing to worry about at all! I'm glad it prompted Steve to hold him though, as I am a sap.
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his remembering him and Steve being dumb in their 20s (aw) and having 2 sets of memories.
Sam had reasons to be creeped out by reality-warping long before House of M, though he did get Redwing out of it at least. *grins* We wanted to work in that Sam's real memories are the original social-worker backstory, and the Snap Wilson/Englehart ret-con set are the fake ones created by Red Skull - it explains all the stereotypes! - but we couldn't quite figure out how to fit it in.
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I really really love this verse you've created!
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And I just wanted to tell you - I love it. I love it very much. Thank you for writing such an amazing story.
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Also, your icon is adorable. Tiny!Cap!
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I love this so much!!!
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PS. happy anniversary!!
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