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cap_ironman2009-03-07 04:12 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2009-03-07 04:12 am
Entry tags:
When The Lights Go On Again 12/20
Title: When the Lights Go On Again 12/20
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: Swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
Author's Note:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq.
Also, this fic owes a great deal totavella, who helped us to shape this into something that didn't have gaping plot holes.
X-posted to Marvel Slash.
When the Lights Go On Again
Debriefings with Steve were abrupt, impersonal affairs these days. Jan was right; he was going out of his way to keep everyone at a distance. Wanda tried hard not to be hurt by that; she knew what it was like to be afraid of losing people, and much as she wanted to hold on to the comforting belief that Steve, at least, had confidence in their ability to defeat the Argonians, she knew he was every bit as frightened and worried as the rest of them.
The sooner they got Clint and Tony out of the Argonians' clutches, the better. The whole undercover spying affair had gone on long enough, and the two of them had a limited amount time left in which the conditions the Argonians were keeping them in were even survivable -- it was time to put an end to it before they lost any more Avengers.
They had lost enough people already. Vision. Vance. Thor, the Falcon, and everyone else outside the shield bubble, who might very well be dead for all they knew.
Wanda exited the dining room, leaving Jan alone with Steve to go over what she'd seen of the building's interior a third time. Wanda had already gone over everything she had been able to learn about the exterior defenses, twice, and after using her hex powers continuously for most of the day, she was starving.
Other women had told her repeatedly how envious they were of her energy mutant's metabolism, but needing to consume more calories than a normal woman of her size was as much a nuisance as an asset. When she and Pietro had been teenagers, rootless and desperate after their mother had died, hunger had been a constant, nagging presence. Pietro had always been on the skinny side, but he had been bone-thin then. The days after they had been recruited by Magneto had been the first time in months that she hadn't had to watch her brother slowly starve.
She had expected the kitchenette to be crowded -- Franklin and Valeria were always underfoot somewhere, and Johnny, who needed to eat almost as much as an energy mutant thanks to his own powers, had made the room his second home -- but found it nearly empty.
But then, Johnny was still hobbling around on crutches and spent a lot of nights sleeping at the Daily Bugle building now, and the children had started refusing to go anywhere without Ben or Johnny after Johnny had been hurt, so it wasn't as much of a surprise as it might have been to walk into the little room and find no one there but Angie, sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands.
The Avengers' hotel suite was painfully overcrowded, but Angie still managed to find places to be alone there, something that must have required making an active effort to hide.
Wanda had tried her best to leave the younger woman alone; she understood what it was like to hurt so much that you couldn't bear to be around anyone. Even after all of thes time that had passed, looking at Franklin and Valeria still made her ache a little; she couldn't help but wonder what her children would have been like, if they had had the chance to grow up.
But Angie looked so painfully alone that she found she couldn't follow her initial instinct to simply grab food and leave.
Wanda pulled one of the packages of ramen that had become one of the resistance's staples -- stores had stocked it in large quantities before the Argonians came, and it kept forever -- and set a pot of water on the tiny stove, using a controlled flare of chaos magic to make it boil instantly. As she dropped the dried noodles into the water, she racked her brain for something, anything supportive to say to Angie.
"I could have done that for you, you know."
Angie's voice was hoarse -- she had been crying again, obviously.
"I know," Wanda said. "I didn't want to bother you. And honestly, I need all the practice with chaos magic that I can get." She didn't mention the crying, or even look at Angie, giving her at least the illusion of privacy to compose herself.
There was silence while the ramen cooked. Wanda poured it into two bowls and carried it over to the table, setting one bowl down in front of Angie. There were times when she really missed ice cream, and this was one of them.
"I'm not hungry," Angie mumbled into her hands.
"You're a nineteen-year-old energy mutant," Wanda said gently. "You're always hungry."
Angie sighed heavily, but she started eating her ramen, so Wanda counted it as a victory. She ate a spoonful of her own soup, making a face at the excessive amount of salt, and then added, "If you want to talk, about anything, I..." she trailed off, but Angie clearly got the general idea anyway.
"The Thing thinks I'm too violent," she blurted out. "Mr. 'It's Clobbering Time' thinks I'm unreliable and need to calm down."
'No,' Wanda thought, 'Carol is unreliable and needs to calm down.' She immediately felt guilty, both because the thought was unjust, and because Carol's current lack of calm was at least partially Wanda's fault.
"Why does he think that?" If Angie was out of control, Wanda hadn't noticed. She hadn't been paying as much attention to the rest of her teammates as she should have, beyond Steve and Carol. It was hard, sometimes, to remember that the Avengers extended beyond the small core of people who had been on the team for years. Herself, Cap, Clint, Simon, Hank and Jan, Tony... Vision.
"I don't know!" Angie gestured sharply, the motion jerky with frustration, then buried her head in her hands again. "He thinks I'm on some kind of revenge trip. What am I supposed to do, go easy on them? They're trying to kill us all. They killed Vance, they-" she broke off, drawing in a long, unsteady breath. "If I'd been willing to use my full powers against them from the start, maybe I could have stopped them. Maybe I could have saved him."
Wanda knew that feeling far, far better than she wanted to. If only she had been there when Vision had been taken away and disassembled -- had reacted just a little bit more quickly when Marcus had kidnapped Carol right in front of her, had been faster, better, more in control of her powers.
She also understood being willing to do anything to defend the people you cared about, to sacrifice principles for the sake of people. She had left the X-Men because she had believed -- still believed -- that going out and helping people did more good in the long run than hiding from them, but in hindsight, the fact that she couldn't place abstract principles over the people she loved would have made her a bad fit for Xavier's team anyway.
She reached across the table and took Angie's hand, squeezed it, and tried to think of something to say.
"I could have killed them all as soon as we got there," Angie went on, "and then he'd be fine."
Wanda winced; that line of thought was familiar, too, painfully and persuasively so, and not from the X-Men. "Maybe," she acknowledged, "but you can't live that like. If you go too far down that path, you can never come back from it."
Angie yanked her hand away, eyes narrowing. "Don't moralize at me. You don't know what it's like."
"Don't I?" Wanda raised an eyebrow. "The world isn't a safe place for mutants. If I tried to strike first, to hurt people before they hurt me, I'd spend my whole life hurting people." It was why she and Pietro had left Magneto, once they had realized what kind of a man he was.
"They're not people," Angie snapped, hunching her shoulders defensively and glaring down into her empty bowl.
If there was one thing Wanda had learned a long time ago, it was that you didn't need to be human in order to be a person. And yet she had killed Argonians, too, wiped almost half a squad of them out in explosions when she had thought they'd killed Carol. And she still didn't feel any guilt over it, not the way she should have. "People say that about us," she pointed out, feeling like a hypocrite as she did so. It wasn't a fair argument to use on a fellow mutant, but it was something none of them could afford to forget.
"I hate them." Angie's voice was tight, brittle with unshed tears.
"I know," Wanda said, quietly. "I hate them, too." She was surprised to discover how much she meant it.
She couldn't do this, she decided abruptly. Who was she to lecture Angelica on why vengeance was wrong, or how you shouldn't let your anger fester, or, worst of all, that you needed to forgive people for hurting you or the people you loved? She might have left Magneto in the beginning, but after Vision and the twins had been taken from her, she had gone right back to him, back to vengeance and anger and hate. Things didn't hurt so much when you were angry, and anger gave you the strength to keep yourself going when nothing else was left.
Django Maximoff was the only father Wanda would ever acknowledge, but she was afraid, sometimes, that deep down, she and Pietro were both Lensherrs where it counted. And if she let this conversation go on much longer, she might forget that that wasn't something she wanted to be.
She stood, and carried her empty bowl over to set it in the tiny sink, then turned back to Angie. "You probably want me to leave you alone, right?' she asked, hoping that the answer would be yes.
Angie nodded silently.
"All right," Wanda said, "I'll just... go. If you ever need someone to talk to, though, I, well, I can at least listen."
"Thank you." Angie smiled wanly at her, sounding like she had no intention of taking Wanda up on the offer.
Wanda nearly fled the kitchen, retreating back to her corner of the bedroom she shared with Angie and Jan -- and Carol, when she was there.
'I hate them, too,' she repeated to herself, hoping the words would ring hollow this time. They didn't.
She sat on her sleeping bag, drawing her legs up under her, and rubbed absently at the mostly-healed burn scar on her shoulder, where the plasma bolt had hit her. They had come and taken Vision away from her again, taken Clint away, hurt and threatened her friends and killed thousands of people. She was tired of sleeping in a hotel room, taking her turn in a sleeping bag on the floor every other night, tired of running and hiding and fighting, of never going outside without a hex to hide herself from sight, tired of eating ramen and canned soup and power bars, tired of watching other people bleed, tired of living in fear.
Tired of being alone. She might be surrounded by people and completely deprived of privacy, but she was still isolated. Vision was gone, Steve had shut everyone out, Clint and Tony were locked away behind Argonian guard, Hank never left his lab in the basement anymore. Simon was spending almost all his time with the non-powered part of the resistance, lending firepower and air support to the ex-policemen and ex-military personal that made up the bulk of their forces; she had barely spoken to him in weeks. Jan was busy running scouting missions and carrying messages.
The Avengers had always been like a family, the first family other than Pietro that she'd had since her mother had died. Now, they felt more like soldiers in an army, working towards a common goal, but without the connection they had once had.
Steve didn't even shout 'Avengers Assemble' anymore; it a ridiculous thing to miss, but was also one more unwelcome sign of how much everything had changed.
Once, she would have noticed Angie's inner turmoil without having to have it spelled out for her. Now, she'd been so fixated on her worry for Steve, Clint, and Carol that she hadn't noticed anything else.
Especially Carol. What did it say about her priorities that she was capable of taking time in the midst of a war zone to worry about whether Carol still liked her? To moon over her long, soft hair and strong, perfectly sculpted legs? To brood over her failure to help her so much that she was blinded to the problems of other teammates.
She had always been part of a team, whether it was her and Pietro, or the Brotherhood of Mutants, or the Avengers, or, after their marriage, herself and Vision. She didn't like feeling like she wasn't really on one anymore.
Was she just fixating on Carol because everyone else important to her was missing or busy? Did she really need to lean on someone else, to belong to someone, that much? If Carol were spying on the Argonians and Clint was running missions with Wanda, would she be fixating on him? If neither of them were there, would she be falling for Simon again, or throwing herself at Steve?
She hoped not; that would be uncomfortably like using Carol for her own selfish purposes.
Wanda wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back against the wall. She had just started to doze off, the exhaustion of a day spent using her power continuously finally catching up with her, when she heard a loud, demanding voice from the foyer, the words muffled only slightly by the intervening walls.
"Where is my sister? I'll talk to you when I'm good and ready; I want to see her before I do anything else!"
It wasn't Pietro. It couldn't be Pietro. He was outside the city, outside the force bubble.
There was no way it could be him.
"How did you get here?" Steve's voice, the shock in it quickly turning to an authoritative demand.
"Oh, please. I ran through after a convoy. It wasn't even a challenge. Where. Is. Wanda?" He spoke slowly this time, spacing the words out with that special irritation Pietro reserved for people who were being stupid and not moving quickly enough for him.
Wanda was on her feet and running for the front room before she even realized it.
Pietro looked exactly the same -- still in his familiar green, blue, and white uniform, not a strand of his white hair out of place. Not hurt. Not dead. Here.
She'd been afraid to even think about people outside the force bubble being dead.
"Pietro!"
He went stiff when she hugged him, for just a second -- Pietro didn't do hugs -- then clutched her back tightly. "You're all right," he gasped. "The Falcon said you were, but that was weeks ago, and SHIELD took forever to approve sending someone in, and it took a ridiculously long time to get Fury to see reason and realize that I was a much better choice than sending the Falcon back in." The entire sentence came out in one breath, words running together.
Pietro had broken himself of the habit of speaking too quickly for most people to understand when they were still teenagers. Wanda buried her face in his shoulder, her eyes suddenly hot, and hugged him all the harder, relief making her feel unsteady.
"You've spoken to Sam?" Steve's voice actually cracked slightly on Sam's name, the relief in it raw and naked. He'd obviously been worrying about the Falcon as much as Wanda had about her brother, whether he'd admitted it to anyone or not. "He's okay?"
Pietro and Wanda both ignored him, Wanda, because she was looking Pietro over for obvious injuries, and Pietro, because other people's feelings had never been one of his strong points.
Pietro's hand curled around Wanda's shoulder, fingers unknowingly digging into the half-healed plasma burn, and she flinched, instinctively pulling backwards.
Pietro frowned, grabbing the collar of her shirt and yanking it sideways to expose the bandages on her shoulder. "What happened?' he demanded.
Wanda whacked his hand, then pulled her shirt back into place. "I was grazed by a plasma bolt. Leave my shirt alone."
Pietro rounded on Steve, glaring. "You let my sister get shot?!"
"I didn't-" Steve started to protest.
"No one let me get shot," Wanda countered. "Cap wasn't even there. You look even skinnier than usual," she added, because this was a game two could play. Is SHIELD feeding you? And what are you doing with SHIELD? I thought you'd gone back to him." It came out as more of an accusation than she'd meant it to, and Pietro looked away.
"He's our father," he muttered.
"No he's not," she snapped. "He's a psychopath who's using you. Again."
"No he's not." Pietro said, quietly. He sounded... odd, voice suddenly strained. He looked back up, meeting her eyes, and said, levelly, "Genosha is gone. The X-Men were able to rescue a few people, but the whole country is... There's nothing left."
Nothing? There had been hundreds of people in Genosha. Thousands. If there had been any chance of Wanda managing not to hate the Argonians, learning this had done away with it. If it was true, then they had managed to kill more mutants than Project Wideawake had ever dreamed of, not because of fear or hate, but because human lives truly meant nothing to them. And her brother had nearly been one of them. If Magneto was still alive... Pietro meant nothing to him, but the loss of that many mutant lives would make him the Argonians' bitterest enemy.
"He's with Xavier now," Pietro said, answering the unspoken question.
"That must be interesting," Steve said dryly.
"You have no idea." Pietro's voice was equally dry, with an undercurrent of something Wanda really hoped didn't mean what she suspected it meant.
"When you say, 'with Xavier-'" she started.
"Don't make me talk about it," he interrupted, one hand blurring up in a 'stop' gesture.
"That's... interesting," Steve repeated, in a slightly choked tone. He was probably being afflicted by horrible mental images similar to the ones that Wanda would now never be able to erase from her brain. "Any other casualties?" he asked, shifting abruptly back into the business-like leader he was most of the time these days. "Who else is still free?"
"Most of the X-Men," Pietro began, ticking points off on his fingers. "SHIELD took heavy losses, but they still have the helicarrier. Moscow is under human control again, but it cost at least half of what was left of the Russian army to do it. We have L.A. back, too, but they still have almost every other major city. We got lucky for a while -- they started running out of usable aircraft -- but now they've got someone fixing them."
"Yes," Steve said. "I told him to. We need the information he supplies too much to risk doing otherwise."
Pietro stared at him, one eyebrow rising skeptically. "You haven't pulled Stark out yet? God knows what he's probably building for them."
"They was no way to get them out, before" Wanda explained. "They've been moved to a new facility now, a weapons-manufacturing center." She offered him a smile. "You're just in time to help us break them out."
Pietro swore in three languages.
***
He still couldn't get used to how small the room was -- after four months in a gaping cavern the size of a football field, his new workspace felt cramped. The walls were too close, the ceiling too low, and the windows...
The windows were distracting. The light that came through them -- muted into a dim brown glow by the tinted glass -- shifted and changed over the course of the day, dimming and brightening again every time a cloud moved over the sun.
He was fairly sure he'd been moved here as a reward, for being such a good, loyal, helpful little scientist. His new supervisor, Enheduana, had told him that he had single handedly done more to aid the Argonian occupation than any other human scientist, and that, when the first newly constructed aircraft was complete, he was going to be given Argonian citizenship and made an honorary Argonian.
Tony had never particularly liked himself; other people might be impressed by his intelligence, or his looks, or the wealth and power he'd had, but he knew what he was really like under the façade he showed to them all, and so he'd never been impressed by himself, especially not after Afghanistan. He had never really hated himself until now, though.
He'd thought he hated himself, when he'd finally managed to get sober after months spent trying to drink until the pain went away, but that had been mild dislike compared to now.
He had had the ability to wipe out the Argonians' power source and main defense in a single blow, and he been too much of a coward to take it, had stalled and hesitated too long, because he didn't have the balls to make the kind of hard decision Steve made every day, and now they had moved him, and he would never get that chance again.
Every day that Earth spent under Argonian rule from the moment Tony had left the converter room was his fault.
The aircraft engine was virtually done. Any halfway competent mechanic could do the testing and tuning he was performing on it now, so without Isimud bringing him technical drawings to review, he didn't even have a challenge to distract himself with anymore.
With great ceremony, Tony wrote down the parameters for the current test on a sheet of paper, then turned on the flow of power to the engine. When it engaged, he revved it up as high as it would go, listening for the sound of misfiring or stress. The design principles were completely different from any other engine he'd ever worked on, but it still functioned by means of combustion, so some things -- like the risk of overstressed metal exploding in the field if he got it exactly right -- were a constant.
It wasn't as hard as it had once been to pretend that recording data on the engine's tolerances and performance took effort; everything took effort now, including eating, or even simply opening his eyes and getting out of bed.
"I'd ask if you were making sure that engine wasn't going to explode the first time it overheated, but I think we both know what you’re doing."
Tony flinched, his heart lurching in his chest as Schultz's smug, abrasive voice sounded in his ear. "There's a very fine safety margin between maximum performance and catastrophic failure with this design," Tony said, deliberately not turning to look at him. It would figure that the one man among the other scientists who had the ability to ruin him with a single whispered word in an Argonian ear had been transferred along with him.
"I bet there is," Schultz said, with a mean little smirk that Tony could hear even without bothering to look. "Look, we both know whose side you're on, Stark. What I need to know is, can we trust you?"
Tony did look, then. His heartbeat had started to calm down now that the original spike of adrenaline was fading, but now the hollow, tense feeling of dread formed inside him once again. "Trust me to do what?" He glanced around automatically for the nearest guard, and saw the Rhino's massive grey bulk by the door, and Clint leaning against the wall beside the window, his eyes fixed steadily on Schultz and Tony.
"Alexei and I are here on a contract," Schultz said, so quietly that the words would have been inaudible only a few feet away. "Ohnn too, before the radiation poisoning got him. I was originally supposed to take out the shield generator, power core, or both, but then Ohnn died, and we lost our line of communication to Fisk, and they moved us. We have a new plan now."
"Why are you telling me this?" Tony's voice sounded odd to his own ears. Hearing someone other than Clint discuss resisting the Argonians was so strange it felt unreal, as if he were imagining the whole thing, or as if, any moment now, Schultz was going to step aside to reveal Enheduana or Mamitu standing there ready to arrest him for treason.
"Because," Schultz said, "plan A has gone to hell. Plan B, which was to let you suicidally blow the power core up with your gauntlets so I wouldn't have to bring the wall down and the roof in with mine and die in the process, has gone to hell, too. Plan C is breaking out of here, and to do that, we need you and Hawkeye in on things."
Gauntlets... Tony found himself staring blankly at the man as he finally realized why Shultz's voice had seemed familiar. In retrospect, it was so painfully obvious he wasn't sure how he could possibly have missed it. "You're the Shocker, aren't you?"
The Shocker -- Schultz -- blinked at him. "Of course I -- wait, you didn't know?"
"I didn't recognize you without the yellow quilt over your head," Tony told him.
Schultz stared at him, as if he'd only now realized that he'd been seriously overestimating Tony's intelligence.
"You regularly get beaten up by a skinny teenager," Tony pointed out defensively. "Why would the Avengers need to know who you are?"
"It's not a yellow quilt," Shultz snapped. "It's a protective suit that serves as a vibrational dampener so the gauntlets don't rattle me apart."
"If your vibro gauntlets were properly designed, that wouldn't be necessary," It was more a casual observation than anything else, and it wasn't until he saw Shultz's eyes narrow in increased irritation that Tony realized that that could be taken as an insult.
"Are you going to help us, or not?" Shultz asked, through gritted teeth.
Toy frowned, considering. He and Clint could do no more good where they were -- if they'd been doing any in the first place -- now that they had lost contact with Jan, and depriving the Argonians of his further cooperation was the least Tony could do at this point. Clint swore Steve and the others would be coming to rescue them soon, but if they could free themselves, the rest of the team wouldn't have to put themselves at risk.
On the other hand, how far could they trust the Shocker and the Rhino?
"Are we really the only ones you could go to?" he asked. "What about the Scorpion?"
Schultz snorted. "Gargan? He's not undercover. Are you kidding? This is his dream come true. It's probably the first time his life anyone's actually respected him and he gets to bully people to his nasty little heart's content."
He could be an Argonian plant, the whole thing could be a trick, but on the other hand, Schultz had known that Tony and Clint were spies for weeks without telling the guards. And it wasn't as if Tony actually stood to lose all that much.
His and Clint's chances of successfully escaping on their own were slim-to-none. All Tony had been able to build himself was the armor's repulsor gauntlets, which meant that he had no jet boots and therefore no ability to fly away; he and Clint would have to blast their way out and then escape on foot. The Argonians would have shot them down before they got a hundred yards. Tony hadn't been ready to take that chance, not with Clint there; the odds on this one at least weren't any worse.
"I've built several small devices that will short-circuit the power for the entire building if I patch them into the wiring system," he said, by way of answer.
Schultz smirked. "Yeah, I figured you'd have something like that." He leaned forward slightly, one hand on the corner of Tony's lab bench, and added quietly, "We're not so different, you and me -- well, aside from you having a zillion dollars, and the part where I actually use my gauntlets myself. I built my first vibrational gauntlets out of scrap in the metal shop at Rykers. Then I blasted my way out of there."
"I don't suppose you have any now?" Tony asked, deliberately not rising to the bait. He might not be a good man, or much of a hero these days, but that didn't mean he had anything whatsoever in common with a petty thug.
"Are you kidding?" Schultz snorted. "Do you think Alexei and I would still be here if I did? I only had them half-finished when they moved us here. Alexei's got them now, if he hasn't broken them somehow."
Tony had been forced to do the same thing with his nearly-complete repulsor gauntlets; he had given them to Clint, who had smuggled them into the new building for him. Now, their disassembled pieces were hidden under a pile of engine parts on his work bench, waiting for him to put them together, and hook them up to the reconfigured plasma gun energy pack that would replace the armor's power source.
He and Schultz, it seemed, had the exact same last-resort escape plan. And they had apparently had the same plan regarding how to destroy the Argonian power core and shield device, too. Tony felt his face flush as he contemplated that; his strategic abilities were apparently on par with a petty thug for hire Spiderman had sent to jail about two hundred times.
"They were supposed to be for destroying the aliens' power core, but once I realized you were planning to take care of that for me..." Schultz shrugged. "We would have been gone a month ago, but I didn't have the vibro gauntlets ready and we couldn't think of a way to get Otto out."
Tony raised his eyebrows, and said, unable to help himself, "No one suggested a very large hack saw?"
Schultz's lips twitched, and he offered Tony the first smile he'd seen from the man that wasn't either mocking or an attempt to manipulate him. "That was Connors' idea, but Otto said he'd kill us all in our sleep if we did it." He paused for a second, smile fading a little, and added, "And he would have, too. Octavius is a sociopath."
Connors' idea? "How many of you were in on this?" He and Clint had spent months trying desperately not to let anything slip to the other scientists; he'd put Clint's life at risk in the name of secrecy, after Mamitu had poisoned him. The very idea that it might all have been for nothing, been unnecessary, was enough to make him feel sick.
Schultz shrugged one shoulder. "Pretty much everyone who'd ever worked a job for the Kingpin. Your fellow legitimate scientists were the only real collaborators in there."
Tony's ears were ringing. He shook his head, trying to chase the dizziness away. For nothing. All of this time, he'd been afraid to speak to another human being, too nervous about whether the other prisoners were watching him to sleep, and it had all been for- "How quickly can you get those gauntlets finished?" he asked, forcing himself to focus.
The other man thought for a moment. "With the looser supervision here? A week."
Tony thought about that, nodded. "I'll be ready whenever you are."
Schultz smirked, satisfied, as if this were the answer he had been expecting. "You'll have to get your precious I-fund-the-Avengers hands dirty," he warned.
"I used to build landmines," Tony said flatly. "And now I'm building and repairing weapons that are being used on my friends. I have more blood on my hands than most of your buddies from Rikers."
Schultz shrugged. "Fine. Then blasting our way out of here won't be a problem. We'll be ready in a week," he repeated. "Don't wuss out over collateral damage like you did on blowing up the converter room."
Then he left. Tony spent a long time staring after him, trying to come up with a rebuttal to that last statement and failing.
He had 'wussed out.' Even two-bit supervillains had expected better of him than he had delivered.
He had spent months undercover, endangering Clint and Jan along with him, and when the opportunity for which he'd let himself be captured in the first place had come along, he had done nothing. Really, an escape attempt now was the least he could do. Even if he died in the process, at least the Argonians couldn't use him as a weapon against the rest of the human race anymore, and maybe Clint or some of the other scientists would be able to succeed in getting away. After all, staying here was condemning them all to a slow death via scurvy.
And Tony wasn't sure how much longer that would take, considering that his bones ached all the time now, and his gums had started bleeding every time he brushed his teeth. There were bruises all over his body from accidentally knocking against things. He looked and felt like he'd gone three rounds with Titanium Man, or had another run-in with the Mandarin, or those hired assassins who'd nearly beaten him to death -- God, was it really over four months ago now?
If Tony, who was used to abuse and injury and in better physical shape than most scientists, felt this bad, then how bad must it be for his fellow captives, particularly the older ones, like Dr. Gruenwald?
The older man might be an irritating and self-righteous academic who loathed him, but that didn't mean that he deserved to suffer for Tony's failures.
Tony engaged and revved up the engine again, listening as the over-stressed machinery whined in protest. There was a slight vibration at higher cycle speeds that increase the stress on the valves. Correcting it would have been a simple task. Increasing it just enough to be dangerous without being obvious was slightly more difficult, but not by much.
He was always so careful not to be obvious, not to be caught. Careful enough that after four months, the Argonians wanted to give him the highest reward they could bestow upon a human, and he had done barely anything to aid the resistance at all.
The more exhausted he became, the harder it was to remember why being careful was important, and, worse, to remember that he wasn't really supposed to be working on the project they gave him, not to the best of his ability anyway.
He could break down, repair, and re-assemble an engine or a missile correctly while half asleep. Doing it incorrectly took more concentration and more energy, and some days now, he barely had the energy to get out of bed in the morning, even given the motivating factor of Argonians ready to prod him awake with a tailblade if he spent more time trying to sleep than they felt he should.
If he could actually get some decent sleep, maybe things would be a little clearer, a little easier, but between the nightmares and the constant tension that kept him awake even when his eyes burned, decent sleep was something he hadn't had in ages.
It made him long for something to drink; alcohol was the one thing he'd ever found that could make him relax enough to sleep when his mind was running in circles and the weight of his exhaustion and the knowledge of everything he had done was crushing him. It was also the one thing that would guarantee that he could sleep without nightmares, no matter what worries were plaguing him.
Luckily, there was no alcohol here, and though destroying himself so that the Argonians could get no further use from him wouldn't be entirely a bad thing, suicide-by-Argonian-security would be faster than suicide via a bottle. Plus, an escape attempt might actually work and accomplish something.
If nothing else, he reminded himself, Steve and the others wouldn't have to risk their own lives by coming in after them.
He wished Steve were there -- or rather, that he were outside somewhere and with Steve -- so much that it hurt even to think of him. Steve had a way of making everything, if not okay, then at least less painful. Just the sound of his voice, or the warm weight of his hand on Tony's shoulder, or the way his smile could-
Tony forcibly cut off that line of thought, and carefully nudged a heavy piece of scrap metal off his workbench, deliberately looking over and catching Clint's eye as he did so.
The crash as it clattered to the floor was shockingly loud in the otherwise quiet room.
Clint was by Tony's workbench in an instant, simultaneously berating him for his clumsiness and asking him if he was all right.
"You know how we were sure if we could pull off an escape attempt with just the two of us?" he asked quietly, as Clint picked up the fallen piece of scrap and retuned it to its place on the workbench.
Clint nodded, making the motion look like he was responding to a 'thank you' or apology on Tony's part.
"How do you feel about enlisting some help and not waiting to be rescued?"
Clint grinned at him for the first time in days.
***
It had been a long time since Jan had been on a team with Quicksilver. Though he was one of the Avengers' earlier members, he had never been a regular fixture of the team the way his sister had. Not in recent years, anyway.
She had never before been on a team with Quicksilver and Spiderman, which meant that she had never truly appreciated the absence of Pietro and Spiderman continually bickering in the background until now, when she had the new perspective gained by listening to them for the past hour.
"--the city loses money on it. Longer distances should be a higher expense."
"Yeah, well, maybe for those of us who learned everything we know about social policy from Ayn Rand," Spiderman snarked.
"You don't even use the subway," Pietro protested, sneering at him.
"Neither do you," Spiderman pointed out. "What difference does that make? And how do you know I don't use it when I'm out of costume?"
"No one is using the subway now," Wanda interjected, "because the aliens have had control of it for the past five months."
"And they'll keep on controlling it even longer than that if we're all caught and executed," Jan pointed out. She flew in a quick loop around Spiderman's head, to make sure she had his attention -- it was hard to tell, sometimes, with the way the mask covered his entire face, including his eyes -- and then came to hover in front of the other three. "The explosives need to go off three days from now," she reminded them all. "Are you sure you can do that?" this to Spiderman.
He cocked his head to one side and grinned through the mask. "You are speaking to the city's new resident expert on explosives." He flourished a tiny spider-shaped plastic device in one hand. "All The Superhero Formerly Known as Ant-Man has to do is talk to this baby with his helmet and all the charges I've tagged with these will blow. It turns out two different devices that use electronic signals to mimic arthropod communication aren't as hard to synchronize as you'd think."
"Actually, I'd never really thought about that," Wanda murmured.
Spiderman handed a small bag full of what Jan had been assured were shaped charges set with remote controlled detonators -- regardless of the fact that they looked like so much junk -- to Pietro. "You go low," he said. "I'll go high. The charges need to be put on-"
"I know how to blow up a building," Pietro interrupted. Then he was gone, leaving a blue and white afterimage behind him.
The charges, scattered around the outside of the building, would ideally lead the Argonians to think that they were the subject of a wide-scale assault when they were triggered.
If it worked, the diversion ought to ensure that potential reinforcements were all too busy responding to the massive 'attack' on Madison Square Garden to divert any troops to deal with the much smaller targeted attack on One Police Plaza.
A real diversion would have worked better, of course, but Steve had shot that idea down immediately. They couldn't justify sending dozens of non-powered resistance members to their deaths solely to rescue two people, however important those people might be to them.
"He's not a people person," Spiderman observed. "Is he?" Then he set his hands and feet against the side of the building and began to climb upwards with impressive speed and agility.
Hank was utterly fascinated by Spiderman's wall-climbing ability, and watching it at work, Jan could see why. Mostly, she suspected that repeatedly attempting to convince Spiderman to let him do bloodtests and other minor experiments on him simply gave Hank something to do, but it was also nearly as efficient a mode of transportation as flying.
Jan's job was to play lookout while Pietro and Spiderman set the charges, and Wanda worked her magic to shield them all from view. She flew in quick, darting circles around the building, scrutinizing the Argonian guards for any hint of the disturbance that knowledge of their presence would cause.
For the first few minutes, everything was fine.
She was never able to figure out, later, exactly what went wrong. One moment, everything was peaceful, and the next, Argonian soldiers were pouring out of the building, plasma guns blazing.
Jan shouted a warning, but Spiderman was too far away to hear her, and god knew where Pietro was.
Wanda turned toward her shout, her hands coming up, glowing with pink and red light. A stream of plasma fire shot toward her, hit the shield of power she had thrown up, and vanished.
Jan dove toward Wanda, blasting at the Argonians closing in on her with her stingers, but there were too many of them, and her blasts weren't powerful enough at long-range to be more than an irritant.
The Argonians had her effectively surrounded now. Jan was closing in, but too slowly, much too slowly, hindered by the need to dodge the plasma bolts the Argonians were shooting at her. She was still fifteen feet away when one of the Argonians lashed out at Wanda with its tail, the appendage catching her in the middle of the torso like a club.
Wanda doubled over, her knees buckling, and grabbed for the tail with one still-glowing hand. The Argonia's feet shot out from under it, as if the ground beneath it had suddenly turned to ice, and it and Wanda both went down in a heap.
A blue and white streak shot towards the melee and then Pietro was shouting Wanda's name, trying to pull the Argonian off of her. There was a scream, and the hatefully familiar smell of burning, and then Pietro crumpled to the ground as well.
"Hey, you! Ugly! Let her go!" Spiderman shouted. He was climbing down the side of the building head-first, like a lizard, his red and blue costume a bright, colorful target against the dull stone.
For one long, horrible second, Jan was frozen. They had Wanda and Pietro. There were too many of them for her and Spiderman to take on on their own, especially given that Spiderman had no long range weapons other than webbing, which Argonian plasma guns could burn through with ease.
They had to get Wanda and Pietro away from them somehow, had to-
A plasma bolt shot directly at her, and she threw herself sideways, feeling a painful flare of heat along her entire body as it passed within an inch of her. She was at point blank range, now, close enough to make her stinger blasts count.
Argonians had a higher pain tolerance than humans, but her stingers were still every bit as effective if she went for the eyes.
She dodged a slash from an Argonian sword, ducked under a tailbarb, and poured every bit of biochemical energy she could muster straight into a russet-furred face. The Argonian yowling in pain, and flailed blindly at her, and Jan easily avoided her broad blows, diving low through a gauntlet of blades and tails and black-uniformed bodies until she was nearly on top of Pietro.
There was a charred black streak along his right side, and he was half-curled into a ball, clutching at it and groaning. Jan had a second to take in his closed eyes and pain-twisted face, and then a giant, furry hand grabbed her.
She screamed, kicking and struggling and blasting the huge fingers with her stingers, and then, suddenly, it released her. She darted away, gasping for breath, and looked back over her shoulder to see the Argonian yanking futilely at the webbing the now covered its face. One of its hands looked burned. Good.
She turned back to Pietro to find that two Argonians had picked him up and were running for the entrance to Madison Square Garden, with Pietro slung between them like so much dead weight. Wanda was nowhere to be seen.
Spiderman was on the ground, now, trading punches with a pair of Argonians and about to be sliced in half by a third.
"Behind you!" Jan shouted, and fired a stinger blast at it.
They were going to be killed if they stayed here. At the very least, they'd be caught, and there would be no one left to go back and tell the others what had happened. Hank would never even know how she'd died.
But they had Wanda and Pietro. Jan felt sick, because you never left fellow Avengers behind in the hands of supervillains who wanted to kill them, but Pietro was being taken inside the building now, and Wanda was gone, probably already inside, and she couldn't see a way to get them back that wouldn't get both herself and Spiderman killed or captured right along with them.
"Fall back," she yelled, swooping around an Argonian's reaching hand to hover by Spiderman's ear. "We need to get out of here."
"We can't just leave them!" Spiderman's voice cracked, and he sounded terribly young suddenly. "They'll kill them."
"They'll kill us, too, if we don't retreat."
A sword came scything at them, and Spiderman bent backwards at the waist in a way that a normal human being who wasn't Steve Rogers wouldn't have been capable of. He wasn't quite fast enough, and the tip of the blade sliced through the front of his costume, leaving a long, diagonal tear, and a thin, red line beneath it.
"Retreat, Avenger," Jan yelled, and she could hear the echo of Steve's "command voice" on her tongue. "That's an order."
Spiderman turned silently and shot a webline at the roof of a nearby building, swinging himself into the sky. Jan followed, blinking tears from her eyes as she flew.
There was nothing they could have done, she told herself. Running had been the right thing to do.
She wished she could make herself believe it.
***
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonRated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, Carol/Wanda
Warnings: Swearing and violence.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Summary: Aliens have invaded earth, and the Avengers are scattered. While Steve leads the resistance, Tony once again finds himself playing captive scientist. In the midst of a violent alien regime, separated by seemingly insurmountable boundaries, Steve and Tony have nothing to keep themselves going but each other.
Author's Note:The point in volume three that we're branching off from was originally published around '98-'99, but since Marvel time runs at a slower speed than real world time, early volume three is probably four or so years ago in canon time. Hence 2004 and troops in Iraq.
Also, this fic owes a great deal to
tavella, who helped us to shape this into something that didn't have gaping plot holes.X-posted to Marvel Slash.
Debriefings with Steve were abrupt, impersonal affairs these days. Jan was right; he was going out of his way to keep everyone at a distance. Wanda tried hard not to be hurt by that; she knew what it was like to be afraid of losing people, and much as she wanted to hold on to the comforting belief that Steve, at least, had confidence in their ability to defeat the Argonians, she knew he was every bit as frightened and worried as the rest of them.
The sooner they got Clint and Tony out of the Argonians' clutches, the better. The whole undercover spying affair had gone on long enough, and the two of them had a limited amount time left in which the conditions the Argonians were keeping them in were even survivable -- it was time to put an end to it before they lost any more Avengers.
They had lost enough people already. Vision. Vance. Thor, the Falcon, and everyone else outside the shield bubble, who might very well be dead for all they knew.
Wanda exited the dining room, leaving Jan alone with Steve to go over what she'd seen of the building's interior a third time. Wanda had already gone over everything she had been able to learn about the exterior defenses, twice, and after using her hex powers continuously for most of the day, she was starving.
Other women had told her repeatedly how envious they were of her energy mutant's metabolism, but needing to consume more calories than a normal woman of her size was as much a nuisance as an asset. When she and Pietro had been teenagers, rootless and desperate after their mother had died, hunger had been a constant, nagging presence. Pietro had always been on the skinny side, but he had been bone-thin then. The days after they had been recruited by Magneto had been the first time in months that she hadn't had to watch her brother slowly starve.
She had expected the kitchenette to be crowded -- Franklin and Valeria were always underfoot somewhere, and Johnny, who needed to eat almost as much as an energy mutant thanks to his own powers, had made the room his second home -- but found it nearly empty.
But then, Johnny was still hobbling around on crutches and spent a lot of nights sleeping at the Daily Bugle building now, and the children had started refusing to go anywhere without Ben or Johnny after Johnny had been hurt, so it wasn't as much of a surprise as it might have been to walk into the little room and find no one there but Angie, sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands.
The Avengers' hotel suite was painfully overcrowded, but Angie still managed to find places to be alone there, something that must have required making an active effort to hide.
Wanda had tried her best to leave the younger woman alone; she understood what it was like to hurt so much that you couldn't bear to be around anyone. Even after all of thes time that had passed, looking at Franklin and Valeria still made her ache a little; she couldn't help but wonder what her children would have been like, if they had had the chance to grow up.
But Angie looked so painfully alone that she found she couldn't follow her initial instinct to simply grab food and leave.
Wanda pulled one of the packages of ramen that had become one of the resistance's staples -- stores had stocked it in large quantities before the Argonians came, and it kept forever -- and set a pot of water on the tiny stove, using a controlled flare of chaos magic to make it boil instantly. As she dropped the dried noodles into the water, she racked her brain for something, anything supportive to say to Angie.
"I could have done that for you, you know."
Angie's voice was hoarse -- she had been crying again, obviously.
"I know," Wanda said. "I didn't want to bother you. And honestly, I need all the practice with chaos magic that I can get." She didn't mention the crying, or even look at Angie, giving her at least the illusion of privacy to compose herself.
There was silence while the ramen cooked. Wanda poured it into two bowls and carried it over to the table, setting one bowl down in front of Angie. There were times when she really missed ice cream, and this was one of them.
"I'm not hungry," Angie mumbled into her hands.
"You're a nineteen-year-old energy mutant," Wanda said gently. "You're always hungry."
Angie sighed heavily, but she started eating her ramen, so Wanda counted it as a victory. She ate a spoonful of her own soup, making a face at the excessive amount of salt, and then added, "If you want to talk, about anything, I..." she trailed off, but Angie clearly got the general idea anyway.
"The Thing thinks I'm too violent," she blurted out. "Mr. 'It's Clobbering Time' thinks I'm unreliable and need to calm down."
'No,' Wanda thought, 'Carol is unreliable and needs to calm down.' She immediately felt guilty, both because the thought was unjust, and because Carol's current lack of calm was at least partially Wanda's fault.
"Why does he think that?" If Angie was out of control, Wanda hadn't noticed. She hadn't been paying as much attention to the rest of her teammates as she should have, beyond Steve and Carol. It was hard, sometimes, to remember that the Avengers extended beyond the small core of people who had been on the team for years. Herself, Cap, Clint, Simon, Hank and Jan, Tony... Vision.
"I don't know!" Angie gestured sharply, the motion jerky with frustration, then buried her head in her hands again. "He thinks I'm on some kind of revenge trip. What am I supposed to do, go easy on them? They're trying to kill us all. They killed Vance, they-" she broke off, drawing in a long, unsteady breath. "If I'd been willing to use my full powers against them from the start, maybe I could have stopped them. Maybe I could have saved him."
Wanda knew that feeling far, far better than she wanted to. If only she had been there when Vision had been taken away and disassembled -- had reacted just a little bit more quickly when Marcus had kidnapped Carol right in front of her, had been faster, better, more in control of her powers.
She also understood being willing to do anything to defend the people you cared about, to sacrifice principles for the sake of people. She had left the X-Men because she had believed -- still believed -- that going out and helping people did more good in the long run than hiding from them, but in hindsight, the fact that she couldn't place abstract principles over the people she loved would have made her a bad fit for Xavier's team anyway.
She reached across the table and took Angie's hand, squeezed it, and tried to think of something to say.
"I could have killed them all as soon as we got there," Angie went on, "and then he'd be fine."
Wanda winced; that line of thought was familiar, too, painfully and persuasively so, and not from the X-Men. "Maybe," she acknowledged, "but you can't live that like. If you go too far down that path, you can never come back from it."
Angie yanked her hand away, eyes narrowing. "Don't moralize at me. You don't know what it's like."
"Don't I?" Wanda raised an eyebrow. "The world isn't a safe place for mutants. If I tried to strike first, to hurt people before they hurt me, I'd spend my whole life hurting people." It was why she and Pietro had left Magneto, once they had realized what kind of a man he was.
"They're not people," Angie snapped, hunching her shoulders defensively and glaring down into her empty bowl.
If there was one thing Wanda had learned a long time ago, it was that you didn't need to be human in order to be a person. And yet she had killed Argonians, too, wiped almost half a squad of them out in explosions when she had thought they'd killed Carol. And she still didn't feel any guilt over it, not the way she should have. "People say that about us," she pointed out, feeling like a hypocrite as she did so. It wasn't a fair argument to use on a fellow mutant, but it was something none of them could afford to forget.
"I hate them." Angie's voice was tight, brittle with unshed tears.
"I know," Wanda said, quietly. "I hate them, too." She was surprised to discover how much she meant it.
She couldn't do this, she decided abruptly. Who was she to lecture Angelica on why vengeance was wrong, or how you shouldn't let your anger fester, or, worst of all, that you needed to forgive people for hurting you or the people you loved? She might have left Magneto in the beginning, but after Vision and the twins had been taken from her, she had gone right back to him, back to vengeance and anger and hate. Things didn't hurt so much when you were angry, and anger gave you the strength to keep yourself going when nothing else was left.
Django Maximoff was the only father Wanda would ever acknowledge, but she was afraid, sometimes, that deep down, she and Pietro were both Lensherrs where it counted. And if she let this conversation go on much longer, she might forget that that wasn't something she wanted to be.
She stood, and carried her empty bowl over to set it in the tiny sink, then turned back to Angie. "You probably want me to leave you alone, right?' she asked, hoping that the answer would be yes.
Angie nodded silently.
"All right," Wanda said, "I'll just... go. If you ever need someone to talk to, though, I, well, I can at least listen."
"Thank you." Angie smiled wanly at her, sounding like she had no intention of taking Wanda up on the offer.
Wanda nearly fled the kitchen, retreating back to her corner of the bedroom she shared with Angie and Jan -- and Carol, when she was there.
'I hate them, too,' she repeated to herself, hoping the words would ring hollow this time. They didn't.
She sat on her sleeping bag, drawing her legs up under her, and rubbed absently at the mostly-healed burn scar on her shoulder, where the plasma bolt had hit her. They had come and taken Vision away from her again, taken Clint away, hurt and threatened her friends and killed thousands of people. She was tired of sleeping in a hotel room, taking her turn in a sleeping bag on the floor every other night, tired of running and hiding and fighting, of never going outside without a hex to hide herself from sight, tired of eating ramen and canned soup and power bars, tired of watching other people bleed, tired of living in fear.
Tired of being alone. She might be surrounded by people and completely deprived of privacy, but she was still isolated. Vision was gone, Steve had shut everyone out, Clint and Tony were locked away behind Argonian guard, Hank never left his lab in the basement anymore. Simon was spending almost all his time with the non-powered part of the resistance, lending firepower and air support to the ex-policemen and ex-military personal that made up the bulk of their forces; she had barely spoken to him in weeks. Jan was busy running scouting missions and carrying messages.
The Avengers had always been like a family, the first family other than Pietro that she'd had since her mother had died. Now, they felt more like soldiers in an army, working towards a common goal, but without the connection they had once had.
Steve didn't even shout 'Avengers Assemble' anymore; it a ridiculous thing to miss, but was also one more unwelcome sign of how much everything had changed.
Once, she would have noticed Angie's inner turmoil without having to have it spelled out for her. Now, she'd been so fixated on her worry for Steve, Clint, and Carol that she hadn't noticed anything else.
Especially Carol. What did it say about her priorities that she was capable of taking time in the midst of a war zone to worry about whether Carol still liked her? To moon over her long, soft hair and strong, perfectly sculpted legs? To brood over her failure to help her so much that she was blinded to the problems of other teammates.
She had always been part of a team, whether it was her and Pietro, or the Brotherhood of Mutants, or the Avengers, or, after their marriage, herself and Vision. She didn't like feeling like she wasn't really on one anymore.
Was she just fixating on Carol because everyone else important to her was missing or busy? Did she really need to lean on someone else, to belong to someone, that much? If Carol were spying on the Argonians and Clint was running missions with Wanda, would she be fixating on him? If neither of them were there, would she be falling for Simon again, or throwing herself at Steve?
She hoped not; that would be uncomfortably like using Carol for her own selfish purposes.
Wanda wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned back against the wall. She had just started to doze off, the exhaustion of a day spent using her power continuously finally catching up with her, when she heard a loud, demanding voice from the foyer, the words muffled only slightly by the intervening walls.
"Where is my sister? I'll talk to you when I'm good and ready; I want to see her before I do anything else!"
It wasn't Pietro. It couldn't be Pietro. He was outside the city, outside the force bubble.
There was no way it could be him.
"How did you get here?" Steve's voice, the shock in it quickly turning to an authoritative demand.
"Oh, please. I ran through after a convoy. It wasn't even a challenge. Where. Is. Wanda?" He spoke slowly this time, spacing the words out with that special irritation Pietro reserved for people who were being stupid and not moving quickly enough for him.
Wanda was on her feet and running for the front room before she even realized it.
Pietro looked exactly the same -- still in his familiar green, blue, and white uniform, not a strand of his white hair out of place. Not hurt. Not dead. Here.
She'd been afraid to even think about people outside the force bubble being dead.
"Pietro!"
He went stiff when she hugged him, for just a second -- Pietro didn't do hugs -- then clutched her back tightly. "You're all right," he gasped. "The Falcon said you were, but that was weeks ago, and SHIELD took forever to approve sending someone in, and it took a ridiculously long time to get Fury to see reason and realize that I was a much better choice than sending the Falcon back in." The entire sentence came out in one breath, words running together.
Pietro had broken himself of the habit of speaking too quickly for most people to understand when they were still teenagers. Wanda buried her face in his shoulder, her eyes suddenly hot, and hugged him all the harder, relief making her feel unsteady.
"You've spoken to Sam?" Steve's voice actually cracked slightly on Sam's name, the relief in it raw and naked. He'd obviously been worrying about the Falcon as much as Wanda had about her brother, whether he'd admitted it to anyone or not. "He's okay?"
Pietro and Wanda both ignored him, Wanda, because she was looking Pietro over for obvious injuries, and Pietro, because other people's feelings had never been one of his strong points.
Pietro's hand curled around Wanda's shoulder, fingers unknowingly digging into the half-healed plasma burn, and she flinched, instinctively pulling backwards.
Pietro frowned, grabbing the collar of her shirt and yanking it sideways to expose the bandages on her shoulder. "What happened?' he demanded.
Wanda whacked his hand, then pulled her shirt back into place. "I was grazed by a plasma bolt. Leave my shirt alone."
Pietro rounded on Steve, glaring. "You let my sister get shot?!"
"I didn't-" Steve started to protest.
"No one let me get shot," Wanda countered. "Cap wasn't even there. You look even skinnier than usual," she added, because this was a game two could play. Is SHIELD feeding you? And what are you doing with SHIELD? I thought you'd gone back to him." It came out as more of an accusation than she'd meant it to, and Pietro looked away.
"He's our father," he muttered.
"No he's not," she snapped. "He's a psychopath who's using you. Again."
"No he's not." Pietro said, quietly. He sounded... odd, voice suddenly strained. He looked back up, meeting her eyes, and said, levelly, "Genosha is gone. The X-Men were able to rescue a few people, but the whole country is... There's nothing left."
Nothing? There had been hundreds of people in Genosha. Thousands. If there had been any chance of Wanda managing not to hate the Argonians, learning this had done away with it. If it was true, then they had managed to kill more mutants than Project Wideawake had ever dreamed of, not because of fear or hate, but because human lives truly meant nothing to them. And her brother had nearly been one of them. If Magneto was still alive... Pietro meant nothing to him, but the loss of that many mutant lives would make him the Argonians' bitterest enemy.
"He's with Xavier now," Pietro said, answering the unspoken question.
"That must be interesting," Steve said dryly.
"You have no idea." Pietro's voice was equally dry, with an undercurrent of something Wanda really hoped didn't mean what she suspected it meant.
"When you say, 'with Xavier-'" she started.
"Don't make me talk about it," he interrupted, one hand blurring up in a 'stop' gesture.
"That's... interesting," Steve repeated, in a slightly choked tone. He was probably being afflicted by horrible mental images similar to the ones that Wanda would now never be able to erase from her brain. "Any other casualties?" he asked, shifting abruptly back into the business-like leader he was most of the time these days. "Who else is still free?"
"Most of the X-Men," Pietro began, ticking points off on his fingers. "SHIELD took heavy losses, but they still have the helicarrier. Moscow is under human control again, but it cost at least half of what was left of the Russian army to do it. We have L.A. back, too, but they still have almost every other major city. We got lucky for a while -- they started running out of usable aircraft -- but now they've got someone fixing them."
"Yes," Steve said. "I told him to. We need the information he supplies too much to risk doing otherwise."
Pietro stared at him, one eyebrow rising skeptically. "You haven't pulled Stark out yet? God knows what he's probably building for them."
"They was no way to get them out, before" Wanda explained. "They've been moved to a new facility now, a weapons-manufacturing center." She offered him a smile. "You're just in time to help us break them out."
Pietro swore in three languages.
He still couldn't get used to how small the room was -- after four months in a gaping cavern the size of a football field, his new workspace felt cramped. The walls were too close, the ceiling too low, and the windows...
The windows were distracting. The light that came through them -- muted into a dim brown glow by the tinted glass -- shifted and changed over the course of the day, dimming and brightening again every time a cloud moved over the sun.
He was fairly sure he'd been moved here as a reward, for being such a good, loyal, helpful little scientist. His new supervisor, Enheduana, had told him that he had single handedly done more to aid the Argonian occupation than any other human scientist, and that, when the first newly constructed aircraft was complete, he was going to be given Argonian citizenship and made an honorary Argonian.
Tony had never particularly liked himself; other people might be impressed by his intelligence, or his looks, or the wealth and power he'd had, but he knew what he was really like under the façade he showed to them all, and so he'd never been impressed by himself, especially not after Afghanistan. He had never really hated himself until now, though.
He'd thought he hated himself, when he'd finally managed to get sober after months spent trying to drink until the pain went away, but that had been mild dislike compared to now.
He had had the ability to wipe out the Argonians' power source and main defense in a single blow, and he been too much of a coward to take it, had stalled and hesitated too long, because he didn't have the balls to make the kind of hard decision Steve made every day, and now they had moved him, and he would never get that chance again.
Every day that Earth spent under Argonian rule from the moment Tony had left the converter room was his fault.
The aircraft engine was virtually done. Any halfway competent mechanic could do the testing and tuning he was performing on it now, so without Isimud bringing him technical drawings to review, he didn't even have a challenge to distract himself with anymore.
With great ceremony, Tony wrote down the parameters for the current test on a sheet of paper, then turned on the flow of power to the engine. When it engaged, he revved it up as high as it would go, listening for the sound of misfiring or stress. The design principles were completely different from any other engine he'd ever worked on, but it still functioned by means of combustion, so some things -- like the risk of overstressed metal exploding in the field if he got it exactly right -- were a constant.
It wasn't as hard as it had once been to pretend that recording data on the engine's tolerances and performance took effort; everything took effort now, including eating, or even simply opening his eyes and getting out of bed.
"I'd ask if you were making sure that engine wasn't going to explode the first time it overheated, but I think we both know what you’re doing."
Tony flinched, his heart lurching in his chest as Schultz's smug, abrasive voice sounded in his ear. "There's a very fine safety margin between maximum performance and catastrophic failure with this design," Tony said, deliberately not turning to look at him. It would figure that the one man among the other scientists who had the ability to ruin him with a single whispered word in an Argonian ear had been transferred along with him.
"I bet there is," Schultz said, with a mean little smirk that Tony could hear even without bothering to look. "Look, we both know whose side you're on, Stark. What I need to know is, can we trust you?"
Tony did look, then. His heartbeat had started to calm down now that the original spike of adrenaline was fading, but now the hollow, tense feeling of dread formed inside him once again. "Trust me to do what?" He glanced around automatically for the nearest guard, and saw the Rhino's massive grey bulk by the door, and Clint leaning against the wall beside the window, his eyes fixed steadily on Schultz and Tony.
"Alexei and I are here on a contract," Schultz said, so quietly that the words would have been inaudible only a few feet away. "Ohnn too, before the radiation poisoning got him. I was originally supposed to take out the shield generator, power core, or both, but then Ohnn died, and we lost our line of communication to Fisk, and they moved us. We have a new plan now."
"Why are you telling me this?" Tony's voice sounded odd to his own ears. Hearing someone other than Clint discuss resisting the Argonians was so strange it felt unreal, as if he were imagining the whole thing, or as if, any moment now, Schultz was going to step aside to reveal Enheduana or Mamitu standing there ready to arrest him for treason.
"Because," Schultz said, "plan A has gone to hell. Plan B, which was to let you suicidally blow the power core up with your gauntlets so I wouldn't have to bring the wall down and the roof in with mine and die in the process, has gone to hell, too. Plan C is breaking out of here, and to do that, we need you and Hawkeye in on things."
Gauntlets... Tony found himself staring blankly at the man as he finally realized why Shultz's voice had seemed familiar. In retrospect, it was so painfully obvious he wasn't sure how he could possibly have missed it. "You're the Shocker, aren't you?"
The Shocker -- Schultz -- blinked at him. "Of course I -- wait, you didn't know?"
"I didn't recognize you without the yellow quilt over your head," Tony told him.
Schultz stared at him, as if he'd only now realized that he'd been seriously overestimating Tony's intelligence.
"You regularly get beaten up by a skinny teenager," Tony pointed out defensively. "Why would the Avengers need to know who you are?"
"It's not a yellow quilt," Shultz snapped. "It's a protective suit that serves as a vibrational dampener so the gauntlets don't rattle me apart."
"If your vibro gauntlets were properly designed, that wouldn't be necessary," It was more a casual observation than anything else, and it wasn't until he saw Shultz's eyes narrow in increased irritation that Tony realized that that could be taken as an insult.
"Are you going to help us, or not?" Shultz asked, through gritted teeth.
Toy frowned, considering. He and Clint could do no more good where they were -- if they'd been doing any in the first place -- now that they had lost contact with Jan, and depriving the Argonians of his further cooperation was the least Tony could do at this point. Clint swore Steve and the others would be coming to rescue them soon, but if they could free themselves, the rest of the team wouldn't have to put themselves at risk.
On the other hand, how far could they trust the Shocker and the Rhino?
"Are we really the only ones you could go to?" he asked. "What about the Scorpion?"
Schultz snorted. "Gargan? He's not undercover. Are you kidding? This is his dream come true. It's probably the first time his life anyone's actually respected him and he gets to bully people to his nasty little heart's content."
He could be an Argonian plant, the whole thing could be a trick, but on the other hand, Schultz had known that Tony and Clint were spies for weeks without telling the guards. And it wasn't as if Tony actually stood to lose all that much.
His and Clint's chances of successfully escaping on their own were slim-to-none. All Tony had been able to build himself was the armor's repulsor gauntlets, which meant that he had no jet boots and therefore no ability to fly away; he and Clint would have to blast their way out and then escape on foot. The Argonians would have shot them down before they got a hundred yards. Tony hadn't been ready to take that chance, not with Clint there; the odds on this one at least weren't any worse.
"I've built several small devices that will short-circuit the power for the entire building if I patch them into the wiring system," he said, by way of answer.
Schultz smirked. "Yeah, I figured you'd have something like that." He leaned forward slightly, one hand on the corner of Tony's lab bench, and added quietly, "We're not so different, you and me -- well, aside from you having a zillion dollars, and the part where I actually use my gauntlets myself. I built my first vibrational gauntlets out of scrap in the metal shop at Rykers. Then I blasted my way out of there."
"I don't suppose you have any now?" Tony asked, deliberately not rising to the bait. He might not be a good man, or much of a hero these days, but that didn't mean he had anything whatsoever in common with a petty thug.
"Are you kidding?" Schultz snorted. "Do you think Alexei and I would still be here if I did? I only had them half-finished when they moved us here. Alexei's got them now, if he hasn't broken them somehow."
Tony had been forced to do the same thing with his nearly-complete repulsor gauntlets; he had given them to Clint, who had smuggled them into the new building for him. Now, their disassembled pieces were hidden under a pile of engine parts on his work bench, waiting for him to put them together, and hook them up to the reconfigured plasma gun energy pack that would replace the armor's power source.
He and Schultz, it seemed, had the exact same last-resort escape plan. And they had apparently had the same plan regarding how to destroy the Argonian power core and shield device, too. Tony felt his face flush as he contemplated that; his strategic abilities were apparently on par with a petty thug for hire Spiderman had sent to jail about two hundred times.
"They were supposed to be for destroying the aliens' power core, but once I realized you were planning to take care of that for me..." Schultz shrugged. "We would have been gone a month ago, but I didn't have the vibro gauntlets ready and we couldn't think of a way to get Otto out."
Tony raised his eyebrows, and said, unable to help himself, "No one suggested a very large hack saw?"
Schultz's lips twitched, and he offered Tony the first smile he'd seen from the man that wasn't either mocking or an attempt to manipulate him. "That was Connors' idea, but Otto said he'd kill us all in our sleep if we did it." He paused for a second, smile fading a little, and added, "And he would have, too. Octavius is a sociopath."
Connors' idea? "How many of you were in on this?" He and Clint had spent months trying desperately not to let anything slip to the other scientists; he'd put Clint's life at risk in the name of secrecy, after Mamitu had poisoned him. The very idea that it might all have been for nothing, been unnecessary, was enough to make him feel sick.
Schultz shrugged one shoulder. "Pretty much everyone who'd ever worked a job for the Kingpin. Your fellow legitimate scientists were the only real collaborators in there."
Tony's ears were ringing. He shook his head, trying to chase the dizziness away. For nothing. All of this time, he'd been afraid to speak to another human being, too nervous about whether the other prisoners were watching him to sleep, and it had all been for- "How quickly can you get those gauntlets finished?" he asked, forcing himself to focus.
The other man thought for a moment. "With the looser supervision here? A week."
Tony thought about that, nodded. "I'll be ready whenever you are."
Schultz smirked, satisfied, as if this were the answer he had been expecting. "You'll have to get your precious I-fund-the-Avengers hands dirty," he warned.
"I used to build landmines," Tony said flatly. "And now I'm building and repairing weapons that are being used on my friends. I have more blood on my hands than most of your buddies from Rikers."
Schultz shrugged. "Fine. Then blasting our way out of here won't be a problem. We'll be ready in a week," he repeated. "Don't wuss out over collateral damage like you did on blowing up the converter room."
Then he left. Tony spent a long time staring after him, trying to come up with a rebuttal to that last statement and failing.
He had 'wussed out.' Even two-bit supervillains had expected better of him than he had delivered.
He had spent months undercover, endangering Clint and Jan along with him, and when the opportunity for which he'd let himself be captured in the first place had come along, he had done nothing. Really, an escape attempt now was the least he could do. Even if he died in the process, at least the Argonians couldn't use him as a weapon against the rest of the human race anymore, and maybe Clint or some of the other scientists would be able to succeed in getting away. After all, staying here was condemning them all to a slow death via scurvy.
And Tony wasn't sure how much longer that would take, considering that his bones ached all the time now, and his gums had started bleeding every time he brushed his teeth. There were bruises all over his body from accidentally knocking against things. He looked and felt like he'd gone three rounds with Titanium Man, or had another run-in with the Mandarin, or those hired assassins who'd nearly beaten him to death -- God, was it really over four months ago now?
If Tony, who was used to abuse and injury and in better physical shape than most scientists, felt this bad, then how bad must it be for his fellow captives, particularly the older ones, like Dr. Gruenwald?
The older man might be an irritating and self-righteous academic who loathed him, but that didn't mean that he deserved to suffer for Tony's failures.
Tony engaged and revved up the engine again, listening as the over-stressed machinery whined in protest. There was a slight vibration at higher cycle speeds that increase the stress on the valves. Correcting it would have been a simple task. Increasing it just enough to be dangerous without being obvious was slightly more difficult, but not by much.
He was always so careful not to be obvious, not to be caught. Careful enough that after four months, the Argonians wanted to give him the highest reward they could bestow upon a human, and he had done barely anything to aid the resistance at all.
The more exhausted he became, the harder it was to remember why being careful was important, and, worse, to remember that he wasn't really supposed to be working on the project they gave him, not to the best of his ability anyway.
He could break down, repair, and re-assemble an engine or a missile correctly while half asleep. Doing it incorrectly took more concentration and more energy, and some days now, he barely had the energy to get out of bed in the morning, even given the motivating factor of Argonians ready to prod him awake with a tailblade if he spent more time trying to sleep than they felt he should.
If he could actually get some decent sleep, maybe things would be a little clearer, a little easier, but between the nightmares and the constant tension that kept him awake even when his eyes burned, decent sleep was something he hadn't had in ages.
It made him long for something to drink; alcohol was the one thing he'd ever found that could make him relax enough to sleep when his mind was running in circles and the weight of his exhaustion and the knowledge of everything he had done was crushing him. It was also the one thing that would guarantee that he could sleep without nightmares, no matter what worries were plaguing him.
Luckily, there was no alcohol here, and though destroying himself so that the Argonians could get no further use from him wouldn't be entirely a bad thing, suicide-by-Argonian-security would be faster than suicide via a bottle. Plus, an escape attempt might actually work and accomplish something.
If nothing else, he reminded himself, Steve and the others wouldn't have to risk their own lives by coming in after them.
He wished Steve were there -- or rather, that he were outside somewhere and with Steve -- so much that it hurt even to think of him. Steve had a way of making everything, if not okay, then at least less painful. Just the sound of his voice, or the warm weight of his hand on Tony's shoulder, or the way his smile could-
Tony forcibly cut off that line of thought, and carefully nudged a heavy piece of scrap metal off his workbench, deliberately looking over and catching Clint's eye as he did so.
The crash as it clattered to the floor was shockingly loud in the otherwise quiet room.
Clint was by Tony's workbench in an instant, simultaneously berating him for his clumsiness and asking him if he was all right.
"You know how we were sure if we could pull off an escape attempt with just the two of us?" he asked quietly, as Clint picked up the fallen piece of scrap and retuned it to its place on the workbench.
Clint nodded, making the motion look like he was responding to a 'thank you' or apology on Tony's part.
"How do you feel about enlisting some help and not waiting to be rescued?"
Clint grinned at him for the first time in days.
It had been a long time since Jan had been on a team with Quicksilver. Though he was one of the Avengers' earlier members, he had never been a regular fixture of the team the way his sister had. Not in recent years, anyway.
She had never before been on a team with Quicksilver and Spiderman, which meant that she had never truly appreciated the absence of Pietro and Spiderman continually bickering in the background until now, when she had the new perspective gained by listening to them for the past hour.
"--the city loses money on it. Longer distances should be a higher expense."
"Yeah, well, maybe for those of us who learned everything we know about social policy from Ayn Rand," Spiderman snarked.
"You don't even use the subway," Pietro protested, sneering at him.
"Neither do you," Spiderman pointed out. "What difference does that make? And how do you know I don't use it when I'm out of costume?"
"No one is using the subway now," Wanda interjected, "because the aliens have had control of it for the past five months."
"And they'll keep on controlling it even longer than that if we're all caught and executed," Jan pointed out. She flew in a quick loop around Spiderman's head, to make sure she had his attention -- it was hard to tell, sometimes, with the way the mask covered his entire face, including his eyes -- and then came to hover in front of the other three. "The explosives need to go off three days from now," she reminded them all. "Are you sure you can do that?" this to Spiderman.
He cocked his head to one side and grinned through the mask. "You are speaking to the city's new resident expert on explosives." He flourished a tiny spider-shaped plastic device in one hand. "All The Superhero Formerly Known as Ant-Man has to do is talk to this baby with his helmet and all the charges I've tagged with these will blow. It turns out two different devices that use electronic signals to mimic arthropod communication aren't as hard to synchronize as you'd think."
"Actually, I'd never really thought about that," Wanda murmured.
Spiderman handed a small bag full of what Jan had been assured were shaped charges set with remote controlled detonators -- regardless of the fact that they looked like so much junk -- to Pietro. "You go low," he said. "I'll go high. The charges need to be put on-"
"I know how to blow up a building," Pietro interrupted. Then he was gone, leaving a blue and white afterimage behind him.
The charges, scattered around the outside of the building, would ideally lead the Argonians to think that they were the subject of a wide-scale assault when they were triggered.
If it worked, the diversion ought to ensure that potential reinforcements were all too busy responding to the massive 'attack' on Madison Square Garden to divert any troops to deal with the much smaller targeted attack on One Police Plaza.
A real diversion would have worked better, of course, but Steve had shot that idea down immediately. They couldn't justify sending dozens of non-powered resistance members to their deaths solely to rescue two people, however important those people might be to them.
"He's not a people person," Spiderman observed. "Is he?" Then he set his hands and feet against the side of the building and began to climb upwards with impressive speed and agility.
Hank was utterly fascinated by Spiderman's wall-climbing ability, and watching it at work, Jan could see why. Mostly, she suspected that repeatedly attempting to convince Spiderman to let him do bloodtests and other minor experiments on him simply gave Hank something to do, but it was also nearly as efficient a mode of transportation as flying.
Jan's job was to play lookout while Pietro and Spiderman set the charges, and Wanda worked her magic to shield them all from view. She flew in quick, darting circles around the building, scrutinizing the Argonian guards for any hint of the disturbance that knowledge of their presence would cause.
For the first few minutes, everything was fine.
She was never able to figure out, later, exactly what went wrong. One moment, everything was peaceful, and the next, Argonian soldiers were pouring out of the building, plasma guns blazing.
Jan shouted a warning, but Spiderman was too far away to hear her, and god knew where Pietro was.
Wanda turned toward her shout, her hands coming up, glowing with pink and red light. A stream of plasma fire shot toward her, hit the shield of power she had thrown up, and vanished.
Jan dove toward Wanda, blasting at the Argonians closing in on her with her stingers, but there were too many of them, and her blasts weren't powerful enough at long-range to be more than an irritant.
The Argonians had her effectively surrounded now. Jan was closing in, but too slowly, much too slowly, hindered by the need to dodge the plasma bolts the Argonians were shooting at her. She was still fifteen feet away when one of the Argonians lashed out at Wanda with its tail, the appendage catching her in the middle of the torso like a club.
Wanda doubled over, her knees buckling, and grabbed for the tail with one still-glowing hand. The Argonia's feet shot out from under it, as if the ground beneath it had suddenly turned to ice, and it and Wanda both went down in a heap.
A blue and white streak shot towards the melee and then Pietro was shouting Wanda's name, trying to pull the Argonian off of her. There was a scream, and the hatefully familiar smell of burning, and then Pietro crumpled to the ground as well.
"Hey, you! Ugly! Let her go!" Spiderman shouted. He was climbing down the side of the building head-first, like a lizard, his red and blue costume a bright, colorful target against the dull stone.
For one long, horrible second, Jan was frozen. They had Wanda and Pietro. There were too many of them for her and Spiderman to take on on their own, especially given that Spiderman had no long range weapons other than webbing, which Argonian plasma guns could burn through with ease.
They had to get Wanda and Pietro away from them somehow, had to-
A plasma bolt shot directly at her, and she threw herself sideways, feeling a painful flare of heat along her entire body as it passed within an inch of her. She was at point blank range, now, close enough to make her stinger blasts count.
Argonians had a higher pain tolerance than humans, but her stingers were still every bit as effective if she went for the eyes.
She dodged a slash from an Argonian sword, ducked under a tailbarb, and poured every bit of biochemical energy she could muster straight into a russet-furred face. The Argonian yowling in pain, and flailed blindly at her, and Jan easily avoided her broad blows, diving low through a gauntlet of blades and tails and black-uniformed bodies until she was nearly on top of Pietro.
There was a charred black streak along his right side, and he was half-curled into a ball, clutching at it and groaning. Jan had a second to take in his closed eyes and pain-twisted face, and then a giant, furry hand grabbed her.
She screamed, kicking and struggling and blasting the huge fingers with her stingers, and then, suddenly, it released her. She darted away, gasping for breath, and looked back over her shoulder to see the Argonian yanking futilely at the webbing the now covered its face. One of its hands looked burned. Good.
She turned back to Pietro to find that two Argonians had picked him up and were running for the entrance to Madison Square Garden, with Pietro slung between them like so much dead weight. Wanda was nowhere to be seen.
Spiderman was on the ground, now, trading punches with a pair of Argonians and about to be sliced in half by a third.
"Behind you!" Jan shouted, and fired a stinger blast at it.
They were going to be killed if they stayed here. At the very least, they'd be caught, and there would be no one left to go back and tell the others what had happened. Hank would never even know how she'd died.
But they had Wanda and Pietro. Jan felt sick, because you never left fellow Avengers behind in the hands of supervillains who wanted to kill them, but Pietro was being taken inside the building now, and Wanda was gone, probably already inside, and she couldn't see a way to get them back that wouldn't get both herself and Spiderman killed or captured right along with them.
"Fall back," she yelled, swooping around an Argonian's reaching hand to hover by Spiderman's ear. "We need to get out of here."
"We can't just leave them!" Spiderman's voice cracked, and he sounded terribly young suddenly. "They'll kill them."
"They'll kill us, too, if we don't retreat."
A sword came scything at them, and Spiderman bent backwards at the waist in a way that a normal human being who wasn't Steve Rogers wouldn't have been capable of. He wasn't quite fast enough, and the tip of the blade sliced through the front of his costume, leaving a long, diagonal tear, and a thin, red line beneath it.
"Retreat, Avenger," Jan yelled, and she could hear the echo of Steve's "command voice" on her tongue. "That's an order."
Spiderman turned silently and shot a webline at the roof of a nearby building, swinging himself into the sky. Jan followed, blinking tears from her eyes as she flew.
There was nothing they could have done, she told herself. Running had been the right thing to do.
She wished she could make herself believe it.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five (a) | Chapter Five (b) | Chapter Six (a) | Chapter Six (b) | Chapter Seven | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Chapter Nineteen | Chapter Twenty (a) | Chapter Twenty (b) | Chapter Twenty One
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And they dress kind of like the steampunk lovechildren of the SS and Confederate officers' uniforms (the mad crazy knotwork on the sleeves).
They would be awesome in a Hellboy comic, I think.
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Also, "Danielle" is unexpected hot, despite the ugly 70s-style bathing suit, and I love girl!Walter's "Why are you touching me? Why am I at the beach? Everyone is looking at me, aren't they?" expression of surly concern.