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cap_ironman2013-06-23 09:44 pm
elspethdixon.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2013-06-23 09:44 pm
Entry tags:
Reassembled, chapter 14, part 2
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 14
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: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
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 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 Fourteen, cont'd
One of Sin's men lunged for him, knife in hand.
Sam grabbed his wrist with one hand, fingers digging into his tendons, and slammed the butt of his stolen energy-gun into the man's stomach with the other. He had been well-trained, wherever Sin had dug him up from; he didn't drop the knife.
Sam could have shot him, but he wasn't sure what exactly the Doombots' weapons did to human flesh. The level of damage they'd done to the walls, floor, and ceiling gave him unpleasant visions of fist-sized holes burned through muscle and into bone.
Sin's snake-themed neo-Nazis didn't share his qualms about using lethal force. Two of them opened fire on him, and Sam had only a split-second's warning as the man he was fighting suddenly jerked and twitched in his grasp to fling his arm up and deploy one hard-light wing as a shield.
His attacker collapsed to the floor, clutching with both hands at his shoulder, his face twisted in pain. There was blood everywhere, bright red, and the sound of semi-automatic weapons fire was deafening.
One of Jan's 'stinger' blasts flared at the edge of his vision; she was diving at Sin's face, mobbing her like a blackbird or a crow. Sin flinched, bringing one arm up, then laughed. "I came prepared this time, Wasp." She tapped the edge of her knife against the thick aviator's goggles she wore, then lifted the muzzle of her weapon and started firing at the air, trying unsuccessfully to shoot Jan down.
Thank God Redwing still insisted on sleeping outside, away from what he thought of as 'the owl-book.' He was a larger target than Jan was.
Sin distracted and one intruder dead or dying still left something like ten or eleven men for Sam and Hank, and Hank's unarmed combat skills left something to be desired. It wasn't like fighting next to Steve, who always had his back and whose movements Sam could track without even looking, and whose shield would protect him from any bullets that ricocheted off Sam's wings. He had to keep one eye on the snake-Nazis and one on Hank, ready to yank him out of the way of a knife or burst of gunfire.
"The other two don't matter, Wilson," Sin shouted. "I'm here for you and Rogers. You'll pay for what you did to my father."
"He deserved it," Sam grunted, as he tried to keep an invader's gun pointed at the ceiling. He was white, of course — all of them were white — and nearly as tall as Sam was, packed with muscle despite the fact that the blond stubble on his chin was patchy with youth.
Where did Sin find these people? This one was barely old enough to vote, and willing to shoot his fellows to death on her orders.
Was she brainwashing them somehow? Or did they just hate everybody who wasn't part of their little Aryan cult just that much.
"I'll kill you slowly, Wilson. I'll start with that bird of yours, cook him alive and make you eat him-"
Sam ignored her. He punched the man currently trying to shoot him in the face, then threw him as hard as he could toward one of his companions. They both went crashing into a fallen Doombot and went down like dominos. That left nine — no, eight. Hank had just head-butted one of them with that fancy silver helmet of his, hard enough to knock him out cold.
"Do you ever shut up?" Jan demanded, and then Sin shrieked. Sam didn't see what Jan did, but it must have been effective, because when he swung around to pinpoint his fellow Avengers again, Sin was empty handed and snarling with rage.
Hank made a grab for her, suddenly gaining at least six inches of height until his reach was longer than Sam's, and caught her by the arm.
At the same moment, the last Doombot, still wildly flailing around as its processor ground to a halt, crashed through Sin's men, knocking them aside like bowling pins.
Hank's head snapped around, and Sin yanked him forward and threw him over her hip and directly into the wall.
And just like that, Sam was the last one standing.
"Cap? Hawkeye? I could use some help here."
His communicator gave him back nothing but static.
The remainder of Sin's men rushed him, using the butts of their guns instead of the business ends on a snapped order from her, and Sam was good, but he wasn't that good. Not against half a dozen men at once.
Something slammed against the side of his head — a rifle stock, or the hilt of a dagger — and then he was on his knees, with someone's hand in his hair and the edge of a knife against his throat.
"This is where you should be, Wilson. On your knees, begging forgiveness."
The entire side of his face throbbed, and Sin's voice was patchy and far away, but he wasn't about to let her get the last word. "Do I look like I'm begging?"
His vision was coming back into focus now, and he could see Sin smiling down at him, all freckles and innocent-looking dimples. "No," she said, "but that will change. You'll beg me to kill you before I'm through with you. You," she jerked her chin at her men. "Grab the other two. We're taking them with us. Daddy did so much for you," she continued, pressing the knife harder into Sam's throat until he had to lean his head back as far as it would go to keep it from breaking his skin. One scratch, and the snake venom she'd poisoned James with would be in his bloodstream. "He gave you powers, the opportunity to serve a greater cause despite your inferior background, and you rejected it."
The Red Skull had "given" him false memories — ones where he'd been the sort of stereotypical street gang member the Red Skull had probably thought all young, black men were — and had tried to use him as a pawn against Steve. The only positive thing to come out the whole experience had been Redwing. "You're insane," Sam told her, and fought not to wince as her fingers tightened in his hair.
"Let him go, you-" There was a thud and a muffled grunt from behind Sam, and Hank's voice cut off abruptly.
Sin slid the edge of the knife gently along his skin, almost a caress. "I think I'll send your head to Carter and Barnes in a box. Rogers', too."
Sam's skin went cold all over, and the bottom of his stomach dropped out. Where was Steve? He hadn't answered his communicator; none of the others had. And there had been that explosion...
Sin jerked abruptly, her knife blade thankfully pulling away from his skin, and for one brief moment Sam thought that Jan had gotten loose and come at her from behind, or that Hank had come too again and summoned more ants.
"What do you mean, 'we're leaving,' Victor?" Sin snapped. Her voice sounded odd, harsher and deeper than usual, with a trace of a German accent. She let go of Sam as if he were something disgusting and swung around to glare at her men, one hand going to the earpiece just visible beneath her hair. "I'm not through here. You promised me Rogers' death. You-"
She vanished mid-word, and Sam was suddenly alone was alone in a room full of cold, damp fog that reeked of wood smoke and old ice.
Sin and her men were gone, and so, Sam saw as he staggered to his feet, were Hank and Jan. There was nothing left in the room but broken Doombots and corpses.
* * *
Steve almost didn't hear Thor's shout. The small, dark interior of the vault suddenly seemed almost suffocating, Doom looming in front of him surrounded by shadows, and the air was suddenly too thick to breathe, reeking of incense and blood. There had been a dead man in the corner, hanging from the ceiling like an animal in a slaughterhouse. He'd forgotten that. How could he have forgotten?
Steve hit the floor on one knee, moving mostly by reflex, the Doombot's blast sailing harmlessly over his head. Thor and Tony turned as one to take it out, and that was when Doom made his move.
Steve saw his hand come up, and raised his shield to cover himself, but he might as well not have bothered. Doom's energy blast hit Tony dead on, a steady stream of blue-white fire that sent flickers of light crawling over the surface of his armor.
The surge of adrenaline-fueled worry snapped Steve out of his daze, and he forced his attention back to Doom himself, now striding calmly toward them. Tony's armor was more than capable of standing up to Doom's weapons; he would shake this off, just as he had the other hits he'd taken.
And then Tony arched backwards, the lights in his armor flickering and going dark, and collapsed noisily to the floor.
Steve launched himself at Doom, no strategy behind the move, just a fierce, violent desire to smash his shield into Doom's face again and again until he had a reason to wear that mask.
Doom sidestepped, but not quickly enough. Steve slammed the edge of his shield into Doom's torso, all of his body weight behind it — not the neck or head, not even now, because this was very probably Doom himself and not just another robot. Doom staggered sideways a step, into the wall, then caught himself with the hand that still held the book and fired at Steve's shield with the other.
The energy splashed across his shield like water, the metal vibrating in Steve's hand and against his arm in a way that made the bones in his hand and forearm itch. It was bizarre and a little disturbing; vibranium didn't work that way.
If he could feel the energy blast even though his shield, what had it done to Tony's armor? To Tony himself?
Knowing it was stupid even as he did it, Steve glanced over at Tony. He wasn't moving, his armor still silent and dark, and-
Doom's mailed fist slammed into Steve's side, knocking him off balance. His shoulder hit the side of the vault and he pushed himself off it, intent on blocking Doom from reaching the doorway, just a fraction of a second too late.
His fingers brushed the edge of Doom's dramatically flaring cape, and then Doom was across the vault's threshold, forcing Thor out of his way with another shot of that strange energy, and dissolved into a swirl of mist, leaving behind the smell of smoke and ice.
Steve only just managed to keep himself from crashing face-first into the floor, his knee slamming painfully into the metal flooring. Damn it. His reaction times were off; he'd practically handed Doom that escape.
His teleportation was supposed to be disabled. Jack's vault should have been a trap, with the Dee book as so much tempting megalomaniac-bait. Instead—
Thor was snarling something under his breath, the words a low, indecipherable rumble. Tony... was still not moving.
Steve pushing himself to his feet, ignoring the stab of pain in his side — it didn't feel sharp enough to be cracked ribs, probably only a bruise — and walked slowly to where Tony lay crumpled on the floor.
The armor's override code did nothing. Steve tried it again anyway, then a third time, then gave up and started wrenching at the edge of Tony's faceplate. The fact that the armor was dead didn't have to mean anything. Tony could be completely conscious and unharmed inside it, trapped inside his own unresponsive armor.
The center of his breastplate was scorched, the red metal discolored in an odd, rippling pattern. It didn't rub off when he touched it, the marks somehow burned into the metal itself. Steve tried to fit his fingers around the seam at the side of the breastplate, then the one on the opposite side, with absolutely zero success. There had to be a way to get it off; Tony wouldn't design something that didn't have a manual override, no matter how much he liked to use the Extremis for everything.
He tried the override code again, despite knowing that it was useless, and forced himself not to panic at the idea of Tony slowly suffocating inside his helmet because Steve hadn't been able to figure out how to remove it. The Extremis wouldn't let that happen. Tony had stopped breathing for over half an hour once and been fine afterward.
But that had been before the Extremis had stopped working properly.
Steve wrenched harder at the breastplate, and was considering trying to pry one of the seams apart with the edge of his shield when a shadow loomed over him, blocking the light and making the near-invisible line that marked the border between the two plates of armor completely invisible.
"Let me." Thor crouched down next to him, hefted Mjolnir, and gave a firm tap to the side of the armor's shoulder-piece — could you call it a 'pauldron' on something as futuristic as Tony's armor?
The metal bent and crumpled, creating an inch-wide gap, and the two of them attacked it together, Steve holding Tony flat to the floor while Thor ripped the crumpled piece of metal off.
It was easier after that, but it seemed like an eternity before Steve was pulling Tony's helmet off, trying to be as gentle as possible. Tony had remained motionless throughout the procedure, no matter how violently Steve and Thor had jerked on his armor or rattled him around inside it, and the sick, frozen feeling that had taken up residence in Steve's chest when he'd first seen Tony go down and not get up again was all-consuming now. His fingers felt like someone else's as he touched Tony's face, felt for the pulse in his neck.
There was a thin thread of blood running out of his left nostril, and he didn't even twitch when Steve touched him, but he was alive. He was even breathing.
Steve sagged forward a little in relief. Tony was going to wake up any moment now, be annoyed at himself for missing the end of the fight and 'letting' Doom escape, and try to pretend he didn't need to go see a doctor.
Several endless seconds passed, during which Tony failed to open his eyes. "What's wrong with him?" Steve asked, tearing his gaze away from Tony's face to look at Thor. He was a doctor, some of the time, or at least, Don Blake was. How much of his medical knowledge did Thor have? However much, it was more than Steve, whose knowledge of medicine involved mainly CPR and first aid and how to administer a morphine injection and apply a tourniquet in a battlefield situation.
"I know not. Doom's weapons were more potent than usual. I had thought Iron Man protected, but..." Thor shook his head slightly, looking faintly regretful. "Mayhap he has merely been knocked unconscious. There are no visible injuries."
That sounded reasonable. Steve made himself take a deep breath, then another. "We should get him up off the floor. Take him to the—do we even have an infirmary anymore?"
"Perhaps not. There were several explosions."
Call SHIELD, then. And Strange, to warn him that they'd lost the book. Maybe he'd actually be able to do something about it this time.
Tony still had a small red mark on the side of his neck, left over from earlier this evening. It was the only visible bruise on him. Steve brushed a finger over it, reassuring himself again that he could feel Tony's pulse, slow but steady.
The sound of running footsteps brought him sharply back to attention, and he was halfway to his feet, shield ready in his hand, when Sam staggered to a halt in the doorway. "You're alive," he panted. "Good. Sin said she'd killed you. Said she was going to ship your head to Barnes in a box." His eyes went to Tony, and he winced visibly. "Is he-"
"Just knocked out," Steve said, willing it to be true. Wait. "Sin?" He glanced at Tony then back to where Sam leaned against the door frame. "Is she still in the house?" He should have thought to check whether the mansion was clear before it even occurred to him to call SHIELD in. What was wrong with him?
"No." Sam shook his head, wincing faintly again at the motion. There was a goose-egg already rising on his forehead, and his costume was smeared with dust and spattered liberally with blood. "She and her snake-Nazi goons all vanished. They took Jan and Hank with them. I tried to stop them, but there were too many of them. We tried to call for help, but nobody answered." He waved at Tony with the hand not gripping the door frame. "Did they knock all of you out? Is that why you didn't respond over the comm?"
Steve's hand went automatically to his ear, where his communicator should have been. He'd left it in the room, tucked safely into a drawer. Even the seconds he'd taken to put on his costume had been time they might not have had to spare, with the mansion under attack, and he'd taken off after Tony without even thinking of it, let alone stopping to dig it out.
That had been three different kinds of stupid.
"Took Jan and Hank?" he echoed. There really was a disturbing amount of blood covering Sam's costume. He thought of Bucky's SHIELD uniform, the night Sin had caught him with her poisoned dagger, and of Sharon's face and hands covered in bright red blood, so much blood, all over her skin and clothes and tipping the ends of her hair when she bent forward and it brushed his face, and was that why Doom had needed to drain that man of blood like a slaughtered animal?
"Is any of that your blood?" Steve blurted out.
Sam shook his head. "No. Some of them had machine guns. And lousy aim." He frowned at Steve, and added, "You want to sit down? How hard did Doom hit you? Or zap you, or whatever he did?"
"He is unharmed," Thor said, rising from his crouch beside Tony. "Doom shot myself and Iron Man, but was not able to hit Captain America. What has befallen the Wasp?"
"She vanished when Sin and her men did. I don't think she and Hank were hurt, at least not too badly, but..." Sam didn't finish. The fact that they probably wouldn't stay that way for long in Sin's hands was too obvious to need to be said.
Thor nodded solemnly, and the black flash of the communicator tucked inside his left ear caught Steve's eye. He'd been better prepared than Steve had. Except he hadn't-No, he wouldn't have ignored a distress call from another Avenger, no matter how angry he still was at Hank and Tony. "Did you hear any of this?" Steve demanded, turning to face Thor. Thor would say no, he was sure, but... "If someone had responded-"
"I heard nothing," Thor interrupted. "I would not act so dishonorably as to conceal such information from you, no matter how many other concerns you had." His eyes went to Tony's limp body, and Steve felt a sick tightness in his throat.
Tony's face was pale, except for that obscenely bright smear of blood, and the scattered pieces of armor that littered the floor around him were bent and wrenched out of shape, as broken as their owner.
"You could stand to be a little bit more concerned yourself," he snapped. "He took one of those shots for you."
"And another for you."
Because he'd been distracted by the looming shape of Doom's armored silhouette and the things he'd been saying about Steve's resurrection. And now Doom had escaped with everything he needed to summon Chthon or seize the spear or do whatever it was he and Sin planned to do, and taken two of Steve's teammates with him. And shot Tony in the chest at point blank range on his way out.
Enough, Steve told himself. Focus on the tactical situation. The room was still littered with the remains of deactivated Doombots, which meant not everything that had come with Doom had vanished when he did.
He made himself turn away from Tony and Thor, back to Sam. "You said Sin vanished as well. Are any of the intruders still here?"
"I don't know. All the ones I could see vanished." Sam grimaced. "I should have checked just in case, but... she said she'd killed you." He shook his head, slowly. "I knew she was probably lying, but..." He didn't finish, just smiled a little ruefully at Steve and gave a slightly embarrassed-looking shrug.
"I didn't even know she was here," Steve said.
"What of the others?" Thor asked.
"I don't know," Sam said. "I heard some explosions, but I didn't-" and then Steve wasn't listening anymore, because Tony had moaned faintly and turned his head slightly to the side, his eyes still closed.
Steve knelt beside him, ignoring the twinge from his bruised ribs, and laid one hand on Tony's shoulder. The gold under-armor was warm under his fingers, feeling disturbingly organic. It always did. "Tony?"
"Using magic to modify your tech is cheating," Tony mumbled. His face tightened into a pained grimace, and he reached up to touch his temple, then opened his eyes and squinted blearily at his bare left hand. "What happened to my armor?"
"It was completely shut down. We had to pry it off you."
"You what? There are manual releases. What did you do to it?" He frowned slightly, and the light on his discarded chestplate flickered on for a moment. The scattered pieces of armor wobbled, then went still again, the light going dark. "Ow. Okay, bad idea," Tony said, and tried to sit up.
Steve caught him before he could slam his head against the floor.
"Nay, you must lay still," Thor was saying. "You may be injured."
There was no 'may' about it. Tony looked grey, his eyes not entirely focused, and only Steve's arm was keeping him from being flat on his back again. Awake and talking was much, much better than still and silent, Steve reminded himself. It would be nice to believe that complaining about the state of his armor meant that Tony wasn't seriously injured, but Steve suspected that Tony would be complaining about the destruction of his armor even if he were on the verge of death.
Tony scrubbed at his nose and mouth, the motion clumsy, and then frowned at the smear of blood on the back of his hand. "That's not good."
"No," Steve said quietly. "It's not." He lowered Tony's head and shoulders carefully, until his upper body was propped across Steve's knees, and resisted the impulse to wrap his arms around him and cradle him to his chest. 'Not dying.' "You're going to be okay," he said, and for a moment, he could almost hear Sharon's voice echoing the words, touching his face with bloody hands and lying to him desperately. You always told people they were going to be okay. He brushed a few pieces of hair back from Tony's forehead, and tried to think of something more comforting to say. "Just lie still. We're calling an ambulance."
Tony frowned, clearly about to protest this, and then his eyes widened slightly and he glanced around at the wreckage of the lab. "Where's Doom?"
"He got away," Sam said flatly. "So did Sin. They took Hank and Jan with them."
"They what?" Tony started to struggle up again, trying to push Steve's restraining hands away. "How? He can't teleport out. The energy field-"
"Did not appear to hinder him," Thor said. "I have," he hesitated for a moment, "a theory about why that may be so."
"My device worked just fine," Tony snapped, a brittle edge in his voice that probably had as much to do with pain as anything else. "He was using some kind of magic."
Thor nodded solemnly. "I know."
"Doom won't kill them any time soon. That's not how he works." Tony said, after a moment, his voice slightly more ragged than it had sounded a moment ago, and Steve winced. Doom was apparently willing perform human sacrifice in order to get what he wanted, and even if he decided that Hank and Jan were more useful to him alive, Sin might not agree.
And no one had heard from Clint or Wanda since the attack began. Or Carol. With Chthon and chaos magic involved, Wanda would be more useful to Doom than any of the rest of them. For all they knew, he could have order his Doombots or Sin's men to take her and kill the others.
Thor shook his head, straightening from his crouch over Steve and Tony. "I fear it is not Doom alone we must worry about."
"Sin was pretty open about her plans to kill us all." Sam rubbed absently at his eye. "I think with that book in her hands, she might be able to. Everything feels... better... with it gone."
"He needs an ambulance, too," Tony added. He gestured vaguely in Sam's direction, then closed his eyes and turned his face into Steve's stomach.
"No, I don't." Sam straightened up from his weary slouch against the wall. "I'll go check the rest of the building, see if there are any of them left. Thor?"
"Let them take a look at you when they get here," Steve told him. It might not be Sam's blood drying all over his clothing, but the swollen lump on his forehead and the bruise already forming around his left eye said that he hadn't escaped entirely unscathed. "Call SHIELD when you get topside and get them to send a medical team." They'd be better prepared to deal with Tony and the Extremis than the city hospitals, as well as capable of serving as reinforcements just in case Doom had left any surprises behind for them.
"Do we know our phones will work? Or any other way of contacting them?"
He should have thought of that. If Doom had disrupted Tony's anti-teleport machine and possibly their communicators as well, cutting off all cell phone transmissions would be child's play.
"Let me check," Tony said, the words muffled by Steve's costume. "The mansion's systems aren't totally down. I might just need to reboot them." His voice sounded distant and faintly dreamy, and this time Steve didn't think it was due to his injuries. He hissed through his teeth, an exclamation of pain he wouldn't normally have let himself make, and muttered something that sounded like snippets of programming language.
"Tony." Steve's voice came out harsher than he'd intended, his fingers tightening on Tony's shoulders. "What the hell do you think you're-"
The lights shut off abruptly, then flickered back on, Sam and Thor's communicators came to life with twin shrieks of feedback, Clint's voice barely distinguishable amidst the static, and Tony went limp in his arms.
* * *
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 | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 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: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
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 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.
One of Sin's men lunged for him, knife in hand.
Sam grabbed his wrist with one hand, fingers digging into his tendons, and slammed the butt of his stolen energy-gun into the man's stomach with the other. He had been well-trained, wherever Sin had dug him up from; he didn't drop the knife.
Sam could have shot him, but he wasn't sure what exactly the Doombots' weapons did to human flesh. The level of damage they'd done to the walls, floor, and ceiling gave him unpleasant visions of fist-sized holes burned through muscle and into bone.
Sin's snake-themed neo-Nazis didn't share his qualms about using lethal force. Two of them opened fire on him, and Sam had only a split-second's warning as the man he was fighting suddenly jerked and twitched in his grasp to fling his arm up and deploy one hard-light wing as a shield.
His attacker collapsed to the floor, clutching with both hands at his shoulder, his face twisted in pain. There was blood everywhere, bright red, and the sound of semi-automatic weapons fire was deafening.
One of Jan's 'stinger' blasts flared at the edge of his vision; she was diving at Sin's face, mobbing her like a blackbird or a crow. Sin flinched, bringing one arm up, then laughed. "I came prepared this time, Wasp." She tapped the edge of her knife against the thick aviator's goggles she wore, then lifted the muzzle of her weapon and started firing at the air, trying unsuccessfully to shoot Jan down.
Thank God Redwing still insisted on sleeping outside, away from what he thought of as 'the owl-book.' He was a larger target than Jan was.
Sin distracted and one intruder dead or dying still left something like ten or eleven men for Sam and Hank, and Hank's unarmed combat skills left something to be desired. It wasn't like fighting next to Steve, who always had his back and whose movements Sam could track without even looking, and whose shield would protect him from any bullets that ricocheted off Sam's wings. He had to keep one eye on the snake-Nazis and one on Hank, ready to yank him out of the way of a knife or burst of gunfire.
"The other two don't matter, Wilson," Sin shouted. "I'm here for you and Rogers. You'll pay for what you did to my father."
"He deserved it," Sam grunted, as he tried to keep an invader's gun pointed at the ceiling. He was white, of course — all of them were white — and nearly as tall as Sam was, packed with muscle despite the fact that the blond stubble on his chin was patchy with youth.
Where did Sin find these people? This one was barely old enough to vote, and willing to shoot his fellows to death on her orders.
Was she brainwashing them somehow? Or did they just hate everybody who wasn't part of their little Aryan cult just that much.
"I'll kill you slowly, Wilson. I'll start with that bird of yours, cook him alive and make you eat him-"
Sam ignored her. He punched the man currently trying to shoot him in the face, then threw him as hard as he could toward one of his companions. They both went crashing into a fallen Doombot and went down like dominos. That left nine — no, eight. Hank had just head-butted one of them with that fancy silver helmet of his, hard enough to knock him out cold.
"Do you ever shut up?" Jan demanded, and then Sin shrieked. Sam didn't see what Jan did, but it must have been effective, because when he swung around to pinpoint his fellow Avengers again, Sin was empty handed and snarling with rage.
Hank made a grab for her, suddenly gaining at least six inches of height until his reach was longer than Sam's, and caught her by the arm.
At the same moment, the last Doombot, still wildly flailing around as its processor ground to a halt, crashed through Sin's men, knocking them aside like bowling pins.
Hank's head snapped around, and Sin yanked him forward and threw him over her hip and directly into the wall.
And just like that, Sam was the last one standing.
"Cap? Hawkeye? I could use some help here."
His communicator gave him back nothing but static.
The remainder of Sin's men rushed him, using the butts of their guns instead of the business ends on a snapped order from her, and Sam was good, but he wasn't that good. Not against half a dozen men at once.
Something slammed against the side of his head — a rifle stock, or the hilt of a dagger — and then he was on his knees, with someone's hand in his hair and the edge of a knife against his throat.
"This is where you should be, Wilson. On your knees, begging forgiveness."
The entire side of his face throbbed, and Sin's voice was patchy and far away, but he wasn't about to let her get the last word. "Do I look like I'm begging?"
His vision was coming back into focus now, and he could see Sin smiling down at him, all freckles and innocent-looking dimples. "No," she said, "but that will change. You'll beg me to kill you before I'm through with you. You," she jerked her chin at her men. "Grab the other two. We're taking them with us. Daddy did so much for you," she continued, pressing the knife harder into Sam's throat until he had to lean his head back as far as it would go to keep it from breaking his skin. One scratch, and the snake venom she'd poisoned James with would be in his bloodstream. "He gave you powers, the opportunity to serve a greater cause despite your inferior background, and you rejected it."
The Red Skull had "given" him false memories — ones where he'd been the sort of stereotypical street gang member the Red Skull had probably thought all young, black men were — and had tried to use him as a pawn against Steve. The only positive thing to come out the whole experience had been Redwing. "You're insane," Sam told her, and fought not to wince as her fingers tightened in his hair.
"Let him go, you-" There was a thud and a muffled grunt from behind Sam, and Hank's voice cut off abruptly.
Sin slid the edge of the knife gently along his skin, almost a caress. "I think I'll send your head to Carter and Barnes in a box. Rogers', too."
Sam's skin went cold all over, and the bottom of his stomach dropped out. Where was Steve? He hadn't answered his communicator; none of the others had. And there had been that explosion...
Sin jerked abruptly, her knife blade thankfully pulling away from his skin, and for one brief moment Sam thought that Jan had gotten loose and come at her from behind, or that Hank had come too again and summoned more ants.
"What do you mean, 'we're leaving,' Victor?" Sin snapped. Her voice sounded odd, harsher and deeper than usual, with a trace of a German accent. She let go of Sam as if he were something disgusting and swung around to glare at her men, one hand going to the earpiece just visible beneath her hair. "I'm not through here. You promised me Rogers' death. You-"
She vanished mid-word, and Sam was suddenly alone was alone in a room full of cold, damp fog that reeked of wood smoke and old ice.
Sin and her men were gone, and so, Sam saw as he staggered to his feet, were Hank and Jan. There was nothing left in the room but broken Doombots and corpses.
Steve almost didn't hear Thor's shout. The small, dark interior of the vault suddenly seemed almost suffocating, Doom looming in front of him surrounded by shadows, and the air was suddenly too thick to breathe, reeking of incense and blood. There had been a dead man in the corner, hanging from the ceiling like an animal in a slaughterhouse. He'd forgotten that. How could he have forgotten?
Steve hit the floor on one knee, moving mostly by reflex, the Doombot's blast sailing harmlessly over his head. Thor and Tony turned as one to take it out, and that was when Doom made his move.
Steve saw his hand come up, and raised his shield to cover himself, but he might as well not have bothered. Doom's energy blast hit Tony dead on, a steady stream of blue-white fire that sent flickers of light crawling over the surface of his armor.
The surge of adrenaline-fueled worry snapped Steve out of his daze, and he forced his attention back to Doom himself, now striding calmly toward them. Tony's armor was more than capable of standing up to Doom's weapons; he would shake this off, just as he had the other hits he'd taken.
And then Tony arched backwards, the lights in his armor flickering and going dark, and collapsed noisily to the floor.
Steve launched himself at Doom, no strategy behind the move, just a fierce, violent desire to smash his shield into Doom's face again and again until he had a reason to wear that mask.
Doom sidestepped, but not quickly enough. Steve slammed the edge of his shield into Doom's torso, all of his body weight behind it — not the neck or head, not even now, because this was very probably Doom himself and not just another robot. Doom staggered sideways a step, into the wall, then caught himself with the hand that still held the book and fired at Steve's shield with the other.
The energy splashed across his shield like water, the metal vibrating in Steve's hand and against his arm in a way that made the bones in his hand and forearm itch. It was bizarre and a little disturbing; vibranium didn't work that way.
If he could feel the energy blast even though his shield, what had it done to Tony's armor? To Tony himself?
Knowing it was stupid even as he did it, Steve glanced over at Tony. He wasn't moving, his armor still silent and dark, and-
Doom's mailed fist slammed into Steve's side, knocking him off balance. His shoulder hit the side of the vault and he pushed himself off it, intent on blocking Doom from reaching the doorway, just a fraction of a second too late.
His fingers brushed the edge of Doom's dramatically flaring cape, and then Doom was across the vault's threshold, forcing Thor out of his way with another shot of that strange energy, and dissolved into a swirl of mist, leaving behind the smell of smoke and ice.
Steve only just managed to keep himself from crashing face-first into the floor, his knee slamming painfully into the metal flooring. Damn it. His reaction times were off; he'd practically handed Doom that escape.
His teleportation was supposed to be disabled. Jack's vault should have been a trap, with the Dee book as so much tempting megalomaniac-bait. Instead—
Thor was snarling something under his breath, the words a low, indecipherable rumble. Tony... was still not moving.
Steve pushing himself to his feet, ignoring the stab of pain in his side — it didn't feel sharp enough to be cracked ribs, probably only a bruise — and walked slowly to where Tony lay crumpled on the floor.
The armor's override code did nothing. Steve tried it again anyway, then a third time, then gave up and started wrenching at the edge of Tony's faceplate. The fact that the armor was dead didn't have to mean anything. Tony could be completely conscious and unharmed inside it, trapped inside his own unresponsive armor.
The center of his breastplate was scorched, the red metal discolored in an odd, rippling pattern. It didn't rub off when he touched it, the marks somehow burned into the metal itself. Steve tried to fit his fingers around the seam at the side of the breastplate, then the one on the opposite side, with absolutely zero success. There had to be a way to get it off; Tony wouldn't design something that didn't have a manual override, no matter how much he liked to use the Extremis for everything.
He tried the override code again, despite knowing that it was useless, and forced himself not to panic at the idea of Tony slowly suffocating inside his helmet because Steve hadn't been able to figure out how to remove it. The Extremis wouldn't let that happen. Tony had stopped breathing for over half an hour once and been fine afterward.
But that had been before the Extremis had stopped working properly.
Steve wrenched harder at the breastplate, and was considering trying to pry one of the seams apart with the edge of his shield when a shadow loomed over him, blocking the light and making the near-invisible line that marked the border between the two plates of armor completely invisible.
"Let me." Thor crouched down next to him, hefted Mjolnir, and gave a firm tap to the side of the armor's shoulder-piece — could you call it a 'pauldron' on something as futuristic as Tony's armor?
The metal bent and crumpled, creating an inch-wide gap, and the two of them attacked it together, Steve holding Tony flat to the floor while Thor ripped the crumpled piece of metal off.
It was easier after that, but it seemed like an eternity before Steve was pulling Tony's helmet off, trying to be as gentle as possible. Tony had remained motionless throughout the procedure, no matter how violently Steve and Thor had jerked on his armor or rattled him around inside it, and the sick, frozen feeling that had taken up residence in Steve's chest when he'd first seen Tony go down and not get up again was all-consuming now. His fingers felt like someone else's as he touched Tony's face, felt for the pulse in his neck.
There was a thin thread of blood running out of his left nostril, and he didn't even twitch when Steve touched him, but he was alive. He was even breathing.
Steve sagged forward a little in relief. Tony was going to wake up any moment now, be annoyed at himself for missing the end of the fight and 'letting' Doom escape, and try to pretend he didn't need to go see a doctor.
Several endless seconds passed, during which Tony failed to open his eyes. "What's wrong with him?" Steve asked, tearing his gaze away from Tony's face to look at Thor. He was a doctor, some of the time, or at least, Don Blake was. How much of his medical knowledge did Thor have? However much, it was more than Steve, whose knowledge of medicine involved mainly CPR and first aid and how to administer a morphine injection and apply a tourniquet in a battlefield situation.
"I know not. Doom's weapons were more potent than usual. I had thought Iron Man protected, but..." Thor shook his head slightly, looking faintly regretful. "Mayhap he has merely been knocked unconscious. There are no visible injuries."
That sounded reasonable. Steve made himself take a deep breath, then another. "We should get him up off the floor. Take him to the—do we even have an infirmary anymore?"
"Perhaps not. There were several explosions."
Call SHIELD, then. And Strange, to warn him that they'd lost the book. Maybe he'd actually be able to do something about it this time.
Tony still had a small red mark on the side of his neck, left over from earlier this evening. It was the only visible bruise on him. Steve brushed a finger over it, reassuring himself again that he could feel Tony's pulse, slow but steady.
The sound of running footsteps brought him sharply back to attention, and he was halfway to his feet, shield ready in his hand, when Sam staggered to a halt in the doorway. "You're alive," he panted. "Good. Sin said she'd killed you. Said she was going to ship your head to Barnes in a box." His eyes went to Tony, and he winced visibly. "Is he-"
"Just knocked out," Steve said, willing it to be true. Wait. "Sin?" He glanced at Tony then back to where Sam leaned against the door frame. "Is she still in the house?" He should have thought to check whether the mansion was clear before it even occurred to him to call SHIELD in. What was wrong with him?
"No." Sam shook his head, wincing faintly again at the motion. There was a goose-egg already rising on his forehead, and his costume was smeared with dust and spattered liberally with blood. "She and her snake-Nazi goons all vanished. They took Jan and Hank with them. I tried to stop them, but there were too many of them. We tried to call for help, but nobody answered." He waved at Tony with the hand not gripping the door frame. "Did they knock all of you out? Is that why you didn't respond over the comm?"
Steve's hand went automatically to his ear, where his communicator should have been. He'd left it in the room, tucked safely into a drawer. Even the seconds he'd taken to put on his costume had been time they might not have had to spare, with the mansion under attack, and he'd taken off after Tony without even thinking of it, let alone stopping to dig it out.
That had been three different kinds of stupid.
"Took Jan and Hank?" he echoed. There really was a disturbing amount of blood covering Sam's costume. He thought of Bucky's SHIELD uniform, the night Sin had caught him with her poisoned dagger, and of Sharon's face and hands covered in bright red blood, so much blood, all over her skin and clothes and tipping the ends of her hair when she bent forward and it brushed his face, and was that why Doom had needed to drain that man of blood like a slaughtered animal?
"Is any of that your blood?" Steve blurted out.
Sam shook his head. "No. Some of them had machine guns. And lousy aim." He frowned at Steve, and added, "You want to sit down? How hard did Doom hit you? Or zap you, or whatever he did?"
"He is unharmed," Thor said, rising from his crouch beside Tony. "Doom shot myself and Iron Man, but was not able to hit Captain America. What has befallen the Wasp?"
"She vanished when Sin and her men did. I don't think she and Hank were hurt, at least not too badly, but..." Sam didn't finish. The fact that they probably wouldn't stay that way for long in Sin's hands was too obvious to need to be said.
Thor nodded solemnly, and the black flash of the communicator tucked inside his left ear caught Steve's eye. He'd been better prepared than Steve had. Except he hadn't-No, he wouldn't have ignored a distress call from another Avenger, no matter how angry he still was at Hank and Tony. "Did you hear any of this?" Steve demanded, turning to face Thor. Thor would say no, he was sure, but... "If someone had responded-"
"I heard nothing," Thor interrupted. "I would not act so dishonorably as to conceal such information from you, no matter how many other concerns you had." His eyes went to Tony's limp body, and Steve felt a sick tightness in his throat.
Tony's face was pale, except for that obscenely bright smear of blood, and the scattered pieces of armor that littered the floor around him were bent and wrenched out of shape, as broken as their owner.
"You could stand to be a little bit more concerned yourself," he snapped. "He took one of those shots for you."
"And another for you."
Because he'd been distracted by the looming shape of Doom's armored silhouette and the things he'd been saying about Steve's resurrection. And now Doom had escaped with everything he needed to summon Chthon or seize the spear or do whatever it was he and Sin planned to do, and taken two of Steve's teammates with him. And shot Tony in the chest at point blank range on his way out.
Enough, Steve told himself. Focus on the tactical situation. The room was still littered with the remains of deactivated Doombots, which meant not everything that had come with Doom had vanished when he did.
He made himself turn away from Tony and Thor, back to Sam. "You said Sin vanished as well. Are any of the intruders still here?"
"I don't know. All the ones I could see vanished." Sam grimaced. "I should have checked just in case, but... she said she'd killed you." He shook his head, slowly. "I knew she was probably lying, but..." He didn't finish, just smiled a little ruefully at Steve and gave a slightly embarrassed-looking shrug.
"I didn't even know she was here," Steve said.
"What of the others?" Thor asked.
"I don't know," Sam said. "I heard some explosions, but I didn't-" and then Steve wasn't listening anymore, because Tony had moaned faintly and turned his head slightly to the side, his eyes still closed.
Steve knelt beside him, ignoring the twinge from his bruised ribs, and laid one hand on Tony's shoulder. The gold under-armor was warm under his fingers, feeling disturbingly organic. It always did. "Tony?"
"Using magic to modify your tech is cheating," Tony mumbled. His face tightened into a pained grimace, and he reached up to touch his temple, then opened his eyes and squinted blearily at his bare left hand. "What happened to my armor?"
"It was completely shut down. We had to pry it off you."
"You what? There are manual releases. What did you do to it?" He frowned slightly, and the light on his discarded chestplate flickered on for a moment. The scattered pieces of armor wobbled, then went still again, the light going dark. "Ow. Okay, bad idea," Tony said, and tried to sit up.
Steve caught him before he could slam his head against the floor.
"Nay, you must lay still," Thor was saying. "You may be injured."
There was no 'may' about it. Tony looked grey, his eyes not entirely focused, and only Steve's arm was keeping him from being flat on his back again. Awake and talking was much, much better than still and silent, Steve reminded himself. It would be nice to believe that complaining about the state of his armor meant that Tony wasn't seriously injured, but Steve suspected that Tony would be complaining about the destruction of his armor even if he were on the verge of death.
Tony scrubbed at his nose and mouth, the motion clumsy, and then frowned at the smear of blood on the back of his hand. "That's not good."
"No," Steve said quietly. "It's not." He lowered Tony's head and shoulders carefully, until his upper body was propped across Steve's knees, and resisted the impulse to wrap his arms around him and cradle him to his chest. 'Not dying.' "You're going to be okay," he said, and for a moment, he could almost hear Sharon's voice echoing the words, touching his face with bloody hands and lying to him desperately. You always told people they were going to be okay. He brushed a few pieces of hair back from Tony's forehead, and tried to think of something more comforting to say. "Just lie still. We're calling an ambulance."
Tony frowned, clearly about to protest this, and then his eyes widened slightly and he glanced around at the wreckage of the lab. "Where's Doom?"
"He got away," Sam said flatly. "So did Sin. They took Hank and Jan with them."
"They what?" Tony started to struggle up again, trying to push Steve's restraining hands away. "How? He can't teleport out. The energy field-"
"Did not appear to hinder him," Thor said. "I have," he hesitated for a moment, "a theory about why that may be so."
"My device worked just fine," Tony snapped, a brittle edge in his voice that probably had as much to do with pain as anything else. "He was using some kind of magic."
Thor nodded solemnly. "I know."
"Doom won't kill them any time soon. That's not how he works." Tony said, after a moment, his voice slightly more ragged than it had sounded a moment ago, and Steve winced. Doom was apparently willing perform human sacrifice in order to get what he wanted, and even if he decided that Hank and Jan were more useful to him alive, Sin might not agree.
And no one had heard from Clint or Wanda since the attack began. Or Carol. With Chthon and chaos magic involved, Wanda would be more useful to Doom than any of the rest of them. For all they knew, he could have order his Doombots or Sin's men to take her and kill the others.
Thor shook his head, straightening from his crouch over Steve and Tony. "I fear it is not Doom alone we must worry about."
"Sin was pretty open about her plans to kill us all." Sam rubbed absently at his eye. "I think with that book in her hands, she might be able to. Everything feels... better... with it gone."
"He needs an ambulance, too," Tony added. He gestured vaguely in Sam's direction, then closed his eyes and turned his face into Steve's stomach.
"No, I don't." Sam straightened up from his weary slouch against the wall. "I'll go check the rest of the building, see if there are any of them left. Thor?"
"Let them take a look at you when they get here," Steve told him. It might not be Sam's blood drying all over his clothing, but the swollen lump on his forehead and the bruise already forming around his left eye said that he hadn't escaped entirely unscathed. "Call SHIELD when you get topside and get them to send a medical team." They'd be better prepared to deal with Tony and the Extremis than the city hospitals, as well as capable of serving as reinforcements just in case Doom had left any surprises behind for them.
"Do we know our phones will work? Or any other way of contacting them?"
He should have thought of that. If Doom had disrupted Tony's anti-teleport machine and possibly their communicators as well, cutting off all cell phone transmissions would be child's play.
"Let me check," Tony said, the words muffled by Steve's costume. "The mansion's systems aren't totally down. I might just need to reboot them." His voice sounded distant and faintly dreamy, and this time Steve didn't think it was due to his injuries. He hissed through his teeth, an exclamation of pain he wouldn't normally have let himself make, and muttered something that sounded like snippets of programming language.
"Tony." Steve's voice came out harsher than he'd intended, his fingers tightening on Tony's shoulders. "What the hell do you think you're-"
The lights shut off abruptly, then flickered back on, Sam and Thor's communicators came to life with twin shrieks of feedback, Clint's voice barely distinguishable amidst the static, and Tony went limp in his arms.
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 | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
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Wonderful update! So much action and now I'm extra worried about everyone. Can't wait for your next update! :-)
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