ext_34821 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cap_ironman2011-08-14 01:24 am
seanchai.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2011-08-14 01:24 am
Entry tags:
Reassembled, Chapter 7, part 1
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 7, part 1
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Reassembled
Chapter Seven
The last of the victims infected with the symbiote virus had just been sprayed with Hank's antidote and subdued when a fresh group of people climbed the steps out of the 59th Street subway station, several of them with shopping bags from earlier in the morning already in their hands.
*I thought the subway was being shut down,* Tony snapped over the police and emergency personnel frequencies he'd accessed via the Extremis. *Are the MTA shutting the subway down or not?* There were times when he hated trying to coordinate things with city authorities, especially now that he no longer had the authority of SHIELD to back him.
Most of the time, the city's police and emergency departments coped surprisingly well with supervillains, but there were times, like now, when the wheels of city bureaucracy turned much too slowly.
*Affirmative, Stark, the 59th Street and Lexington station is being shut down. All available units between Central Park South and Times Square, report to 59th and Lexington. Acknowledge.*
Tony tuned the radio chatter out as ambulances began reporting in, and gave his full attention to the two men and three women who had just exited the subway station, all of them writhing convulsively as sticky black goo began oozing over their skin. His helmet's air filters kept all foreign particles out, but if he'd taken it off, he knew the air would be heavy with the thick, cloying scent of cotton candy and burned sugar that always surrounded the Venom symbiote.
"Just stay calm, people." Steve stepped forward, raising the shield he had lowered when the last of the previous victims had slumped to the ground, fully human again. "You've been infected with an airborne toxin. Just stay still, and we'll get you the antidote." The breathing mask over his face muffled his voice, but he still managed to project calm authority.
The woman on the left dropped her Museum of Natural History giftshop bag onto the pavement, a pair of stuffed dinosaurs spilling out of it, and turned on Steve, hissing. The last few square inches of dark brown skin visible on her face disappeared beneath a wave of oily black, and eight inches of tongue lolled out of her mouth, twisting in midair like a snake's.
The two men were the last to succumb, their greater body mass buying them an extra half-second of cognizance – the older one, a white man with thinning hair and one of those omnipresent paint-splatter sweatshirts all the tourist shops sold, screamed hysterically as black goo crawled up his torso, the sound raw and grating.
As he stepped forward to seize the nearest victim by the arms, Tony spared a moment to be grateful that it was a weekday, and the city schools were in session at this time of year. Hank's antidote worked as well on children as adults, but subduing a child in order to spray anti-toxin in its face was far, far down on the list of things Tony ever wanted to do.
The woman struggled and clawed at him, preternaturally strong, but unskilled and completely out of control, and for a moment, he was back in the dining room of the Meridian, trying to prevent desperate, fear-crazed people from killing one another and unable to use his armor at more than a fraction of its capacity. The tiniest misjudgment could kill someone, break their neck, burn holes through them, and then the sticky-sugar smell his helmet was sealing out would be replaced by scorched meat.
The woman bucked violently, ripping herself free of his hold, and grabbed him by the throat, just below the bottom edge of his helmet – stupid, so stupid, letting himself get distracted that way – and then he was airborne.
Something hard slammed into his back, and bright lights flashed in his head.
Time lurched, like a DVD freezing and then skipping forwards. He was lying on the ground, the world at a 90-degree angle. Steve was charging at the woman, shield raised. Beyond him, Carol was struggling with the larger of the two men, arm locked around his neck in a hold that would have immobilized any normal human; the newly created symbiote howled and lashed out at her with sticky black pseudopods, pulling at the breathing mask on her face. Clint was pinned to the ground by a mass of writhing black, an impossibly wide, toothy jaw snapping at his throat.
Tony struggled to get up, struggled to breathe, his chest a tight knot of pain. For an endless moment, his lungs refused to work, and then he managed to suck in a shallow, ragged breath. The sharp, suffocating pain was immediately cut in half.
He shook his head, trying to force the high-pitched ringing noise out of his ears, and reached out for the bent remains of the lamppost he had hit, his gauntlet clinking dully against the metal. The armor's damage reports scrolled through his head as he pulled himself upright; it was barely dented.
Old Shellhead was a lot tougher than he was. He'd expended a lot of time and effort making it that way.
As he let go of the post and stepped toward the fight again, a tiny black shape dove for the man Carol was restraining. A cloud of white mist surrounded his head and shoulders, and then Jan was darting upwards again, easily evading the man's attempts to grab her with hands and prehensile tongue.
*Those tongues were disgusting the last time we fought these things, and they're still disgusting,* Jan muttered via the comlink.
*I think they get worse with repeated exposure,* Clint said. *Fuck, someone get this thing the hell off me. Falcon? Falcon, it's licking me. Spray it already!*
Steve hit one of the venom symbiotes in the face with his shield, sending it reeling back into Tony's waiting hands. He locked eyes with Tony over the thing's head for a fraction of a second, his gaze flicking from Tony to the bent lamppost, then turned away to help Clint. His hand latched onto the thing's shoulder – or what Tony thought was its shoulder – and yanked it backwards just in time to keep Clint's face intact.
The thing's jaws snapped shut on empty air, and then Sam dropped from the sky and hit it full-force, the momentum of the impact knocking it away from Clint. Sam thrust the canister of antidote in its face, only to be brought up short as its tongue wrapped around his wrist.
Tony tightened his grip on the violently struggling woman in his arms, ignoring the lingering dizziness and raw ache in his lungs that made each breath an effort. Jan was there like magic, probably evidence that he still wasn't tracking completely straight, and then the woman went limp, the black coating melting away to reveal a torn and rumpled business suit and short blonde hair spiky with the remains of the dissolving symbiote-substance.
It wasn't alive, unlike the real Venom and Carnage symbiotes, but a byproduct of the toxin, which contained protein compounds from one of the symbiotes as well as a cocktail of biological and chemical agents. It was a nasty piece of work, originally designed by Doom as a contact poison and refined by A.I.M. into a more easily controllable airborne compound that entered the body via the respiratory tract.
*Can you hurry it up up there, Goldilocks?* Jan asked, tone closer to an order than a question. *That was the last of my antidote.*
"But a moment more, and the vapors shall disperse." Thor didn't bother to use the comlink, his voice carrying easily over the noise of the fight and the drone of his spinning hammer even without it.
Tony lowered the unconscious woman gently to the ground, beside Carol's man and the limp form of the woman with the museum bag, looked up just in time to see Sam's canister of antidote hit the sidewalk with a clank.
Sam was beating at the symbiote with his wings and free hand both, yanking violently on the tongue still wrapped around his wriSt. Steve punched it in the kidneys, a hard jab that Tony could tell he pulled only slightly, and it howled, but kept its hands firmly locked around Sam's throat.
Clint had pushed himself to his feet, his hand moving automatically to his shoulder as if he were reaching for the quiver he wasn't wearing; he'd left the arrows in the quinjet, joking that the last thing he wanted was to be stabbed with one of his own weapons again.
The antidote skidded across the pavement, rolling toward the curb. Tony reached for it, and nearly overbalanced as the ground lurched under him. The canister skittered away from his fingers, his hands clumsy as they'd rarely been even when he'd been drinking. What the hell was wrong with him? He hadn't hit the lamppost hard enough to have a real concussion; he'd only been out for a few seconds.
He gritted his teeth and reached for it again, only to have it snatched out of his grasp by a blur of brown and white feathers.
With a harsh scream, Redwing launched himself into the air and dropped the canister into Carol's waiting hands. She sprayed it, covering Steve, Sam, and the sole remaining artificial symbiote indiscriminately with a white chemical mist, and the symbiote shuddered and went limp, gradually transforming back into a middle-aged tourist in a garish sweatshirt.
For a moment, everyone just stood there. Steve still held himself as if ready for an attack, whole body a study in coiled tension. Beside him, Sam rubbed at his throat with one hand, wincing.
Redwing landed on the unconscious man's chest, eyeing him first with one baleful golden eye, then the other; Tony wasn't sure if it was general suspicion, confusion over the fact that the monster of moments before was gone, or vengeful wrath because the man had tried to hurt Sam.
After a few long moments during which all of the victims of the toxin failed to move, Tony let himself relax, hunching forward to ease the ache in his lungs. Hank's antidote really did work, it seemed, even if the part of him that had seen one too many horror movies kept expecting one of the men or women who had been affected to suddenly sit up and try to bite someone.
His back throbbed hotly where he'd hit the lamppost; it was probably going to bruise. The armor made rubbing at the injury a useless gesture, but he did it anyway. Steve would probably tell him that bruises would remind him to pay more attention to the fight next time, and he'd be right. If he hadn't been wearing the armor, he could have broken his back.
"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, looking first to Sam, then Tony.
"No," Clint grumbled. He rubbed at the exposed parts of his face with one glove, trying to scrape off the saliva that covered it. "I nearly had my face bitten off. And I've got its spit all over me."
Sam swallowed. "I'm fine," he said, voice hoarse. He held up one wrist, and Redwing hopped up from his perch atop the unconscious man to land heavily on it, talons digging into Sam's thick leather glove.
"The city's going to want me to pay for that lamppost," Tony said. It wasn't an actual answer, but he wasn't sure he could give one right now. He wasn't actually injured, beyond the bruises, but there was definitely something wrong with him. Maybe he'd hit the lamppost harder than he'd thought.
The Extremis had healed his body completely when he acquired it, erasing all the old damage. A new heart to replace the mechanical one, a new liver to replace the one he'd tried to destroy, new lungs to take the place of ones scarred by pneumonia and damaged by years of improper bloodflow. His body could be injured, or worn out by too little sleep or too much stress, but he didn't get sick anymore, couldn't suffer from any kind of cumulative damage, except, apparently, for damage to the Extremis itself. He'd barely been using the Extremis during the fight, though, so it had to be the impact.
There ought to be some way to increase the armor's ability to absorb kinetic force. Steve's shield's ability to do the same was an inherent property of vibranium and thus not replicable, but there were other things he could do. Force shields were too much of an energy drain, but maybe...
Sam turned to stare at the damaged lamppost, his eyebrows going up. "If it had been one of the old, wrought-iron ones, it wouldn't have bent like that."
"My armor's a titanium-steel alloy. It would still have bent."
The whine of Thor's spinning hammer abruptly ceased, and Thor landed in the middle of the street with a thud Tony could feel in his bones. "The last of the vapors have dispersed. The air is once more safe to breathe."
The others immediately pulled their masks off, Jan returning to full size after she did so.
"Good work, guys," she said. "Who wants to stay and talk to the police and the press?" The Doppler sound of an ambulance siren nearly drowned out the end of her sentence, as the first of the crews of paramedics arrived, swerving carefully around Thor to pull up next to the curb.
Carol took a half-step forward. "I can do it; I don't mind talking to reporters."
Steve didn't even bother to volunteer – he and Sam were already talking to the ambulance crew. As Tony watched, he gestured to the fallen pedestrians with one hand, saying, "Some of them may have minor injuries. We tried to be careful when we restrained them, but—"
"It was like that fear toxin thing all over again, huh?" the EMT asked. He folded his skinny frame down to peer at one of the victims, frowning, then turned to his partner. "DeSoto, can I get some help with a stretcher?"
Tony opened a link to Steve's com unit, making sure to broadcast just to him. *I'll see you back at the Tower. Hank will want a report on how his antidote worked.* And Tony needed to go sit down somewhere before he keeled over in front of a bunch of emergency workers and in sight of at least two news helicopters, not to mention most of his teammates.
The dizziness and pain were fading, but he still felt shaky, and while he could put on a smile for reporters while far more seriously injured than this, the others more than had this one covered. They didn't need Tony here to pose for the cameras.
Steve turned to smile at him, that recruitment-poster perfect grin that always made Tony want to smile back, even when he couldn't. There was a tear through the leather fabric of his pants, halfway up his right thigh, but he looked otherwise untouched by the chaos of the past twenty minutes. From the easy set of his shoulder and the open happiness in that smile, he was pleased with the fight's outcome.
He ought to be; they had been lucky today, despite Tony's slip-up. No one had been seriously hurt, not even the people affected by the toxin. A.I.M., unfortunately, had used a timed smoke bomb to release the formula into the air, so they'd been denied the dubious pleasure of helping the police arrest Headcase twice in one month, but compared to A.I.M.'s last poison gas attack, this one had been easy. Should have been easy, if he hadn't been so tired, hadn't let himself get distracted.
The gas main explosion three days ago had not been easy, and the subway accident yesterday had been an ugly, messy disaster all around – the Avengers hadn't been called in on that one, but it had been the top news item on every local news feed Tony had open until half an hour ago, when the venom symbiotes rampaging down Lexington Avenue had replaced it. Keeping all the datafeeds open made his head ache, the stab of pain over his left eye a familiar presence by now, but it was necessary.
Spiderman claimed to have broken up twice as many muggings in the past week as usual, and according to Luke Cage and Daredevil, there'd been an increase in domestic violence incidents throughout Hell's Kitchen, with the worst of the fights taking place the closest to St. Margaret's Cathedral. Chthon's presence was poisoning the city, slowly but surely.
They needed to stay on the ball. And they needed to keep public confidence in superheroes high, or the tension caused by Chthon and the apparently steadily increasing power leakage from spear would find a new outlet.
Tony hadn't sacrificed his integrity, his reputation, half his friendships, and far too many people's lives to have anti-superhuman sentiment break out all over again. Not when they'd finally managed to turn the tide of public opinion and get Registration repealed.
"I don't think I like this new A.I.M.," Clint commented. "It used to take MODOK at least a week to get his plans in motion after a jailbreak."
"That's because MODOK had plans," Tony said. With his helmet on, he didn't have to try to cover his exhaustion or add animation to his voice – the helmet's voice modulators covered a multitude of sins. "I'm not sure Maddigan does." A.I.M. had never had much in the way of discernible goals, aside from the pursuit of ever-fancier ways to destroy things via cutting edge science, but lately their plans had been even more random than usual, as if they'd switched from the pursuit of knowledge and weapons development at all cost to pure promotion of anarchy for anarchy's sake.
"He doesn't," Carol said. "Jessica's done some digging on him – he's pretty much A.I.M.'s puppet, more of a figurehead than an actual leader. Whatever they did to him to keep him, well, alive's as good a term as any... his sanity didn't come through the experience intact. Not that he was all that sane to begin with," she added.
"We weren't great at plans, when we were his age." Clint shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. I think you and Spiderwoman should keep an eye on him. Sanity is optional for supervillains." He glanced back over his shoulder to where Thor and Jan were talking to two uniformed policemen and a woman with a microphone and a plastic smile. "Jan's waving at you," he added. "I think you're on deck."
Carol ran one hand through her hair, and tugged her sagging left glove back up her arm. "Reporters aren't really that hard to talk to, you know. It's all in how you spin it. You just have to be careful what you let them see." She strode towards the camera confidently, the two-inch heels of her boots striking hard against the pavement. Tony had seen runway models display less poise.
"Are you waiting to go back with the Quinjet, or do you want a lift back to the tower?" he asked, turning to Clint.
Clint shook his head slightly. "Considering how lovey-dovey it looks when any of you guys fly while carrying someone, and considering the camera crews right over there and how much fun the media had debating whether or not you'd ever slept with Henry Hellrung, I think I'll wait for the Quinjet."
Even after years' worth of experience trying to manage his public image, there were still moments when the need to constantly worry over what the media would think got extremely annoying. Especially when other people worried about it for him. "Just because you know those rumors are true doesn't mean the rest of the country doesn't think they were all baseless tabloid speculation," Tony said, not bothering to keep the irritation from his voice. It survived the voice modulation loud and clear. "No one will think you've caught slutty bisexual cooties from me."
"Wait, they're true? You and Simon's new boyfriend actually-" Clint made a vague hand gesture that could have encompassed anything from sex to Parcheesi.
"According to reliable sources." Tony had been drinking heavily enough by that point that he didn't remember much, beyond the fact that he'd thought Henry's initial greeting – "Hi, I'm Henry Hellrung, and I'm going to be playing you on television," – had been a clever joke.
"That's creepy."
Tony rolled his eyes, secure in the knowledge that no one could see his face. "There are times when you're even less mature than Spiderman, Hawkeye." He probably should have been amused by it; people had been reacting to his sex life with everything from envy to disgust since he'd been seventeen. He didn't feel like being amused; his head hurt, his chest hurt, and reporters were starting to cast glances in their direction.
He sent one more silent status update to Steve's communicator, and fired his boot jets.
* * *
Steve studied the image on the screen in front of him; the security camera still was blurry and pixilated, but he didn't need to see the woman in the picture's face to recognize her. The way she held herself, the gun she carried, the knife strapped to the outside of her thigh would have been enough even without the blurred glimpse of curly hair.
He didn't need to look to Sharon for confirmation – which begged the question; why had Nick actually called him to the Helicarrier today? Sharon, too, would have known the woman's identity as soon as she saw her, making Steve's ID unnecessary.
"Sin," he said. "It's definitely her. And at least one of the men she had with her when she attacked Bucky and Sharon – you can see part of his arm just inside the frame, there."
"Oh, we knew that," Nick said. "She left three men alive at the third installation she attacked. I didn't call ya up here for an identification. I was hopin' ya might have some idea of what the hell it is she wants." He stabbed an unlit cigar at the picture, using it like a pointer. "That was taken four days ago, at a SHIELD R&D facility in Jersey. Everyone in the facility was killed. We kept it off the news, and the same for the one before that, but we're not goin' to be able to keep last night's attack quiet. Which comin' on top of getting a Helicarrier blown to hell and gone last spring, is going to have Washington on our necks. Again. We need answers, people."
Bucky shrugged one shoulder – the right one, the one that was still flesh and blood. "She wants revenge. It's not complicated; we killed Crossbones, and his death wasn't pretty, or easy." The dark circles that had still smudged his eyes the last time Steve had seen him were gone; he looked fully recovered from the snake venom now, and though there were probably still bandages hiding under his clothing, you couldn't tell it from the way he moved. Seeing him now did a little to ease the memory of him leaning on Sharon, his side covered in blood, but not enough. It had taken half an hour for Steve to get all the blood off the kitchen table, counter, and floor. They had thrown the ruined, blood-stained dishtowel away.
Nick gave him a flat look. "Yeah, but why now? And why bother with those men when it's the people right here in this room that she wants? Little Miss Crazy's always been the impulsive type. These attacks are targeted, planned. Without Daddy to hold her leash, who's givin' her orders?"
"The voices in her head," Sharon muttered. Then, slightly louder and with significantly less sarcasm, "When she fought us, she kept saying, 'You killed me, you killed Brock, I'll make you pay,' over and over. She may not have any endgame beyond causing as much damage to SHIELD as possible, and with James up here recovering from her poison, any SHIELD employee might do as a temporary substitute."
"It's a little more complicated than that." Nick slid three pieces of paper across the conference table, one to each of them. "This is a transcript of her conversation with one of the men she very pointedly didn't kill last night. The part that starts with 'We are coming for ya, Fury,' is particularly interesting."
"Like I said," Nick went on, as Steve took the paper and quickly scanned its contents, "we know she wants revenge. What we need to know is what she thinks she's doing, and who she's doin' it for."
The transcript had several lines of asterisk symbols scattered through it, where portions of the conversation had not been picked up by the microphone, but the important part had been perfectly audible.
"We are coming for you, Fury. For you, and for Barnes, and Rogers, and Carter. You will pay for the good men you have killed, and the plans you have ruined. The Red Skull is coming for you. Daddy and I are going to make you all beg for mercy before you die."
God damnit, they had killed Red Skull. Even dead twice over, he was still reaching out from his well-deserved grave to try and destroy people Steve loved.
What hold had he had over Sin, that she would carry on fighting for his warped cause even after his death, to the point where she tried to become the father who had used and tortured and brainwashed her?
Unless... Steve shoved the thought away. Sin couldn't have meant that bit about 'Daddy and I' literally. Red Skull was dead. He had to be dead.
"Interesting." Sharon's voice was serious, with the slightest hint of something that might have been skepticism, or might have been unease. "She's probably delusional, but... when Red Skull was killed the first time, everyone in this room saw his corpse. SHIELD autopsied it. I touched it. And then he showed up in Alexander Lukin's body."
Nick gestured with his unlit cigar, the motion encompassing all of them. "I want your honest opinion. Do you think there's any chance that she's not just talkin' metaphors? That Red Skull really is still around somehow, and in contact with her?"
"No," Sharon was shaking her head. "The first time he died, the cosmic cube was right there. He was able to use it to transfer his consciousness. The second time, there was no way for him to escape. We checked Lukin's body; the cube wasn't there."
Steve was tempted to agree with her – surely even the Red Skull only got so many opportunities to cheat death – but there had been those last few moments before his second, final death when Lukin had been in control of his body again. Had approaching death given him the strength to seize control from Red Skull one last time, or had Red Skull already been gone? It was a question that had haunted Steve, at first, but as the summer had passed without any sign that Red Skull's death had been anything other than permanent, he had let himself relax, let himself believe, finally, that the Red Skull was truly dead and gone.
"It wouldn't be the first time he's cheated death," he said, reluctantly. "It does seem unlikely, though."
Bucky frowned down at the note in his hand, the paper white against stainless steel fingers. The black SHIELD uniform had finally stopped making him look like a stranger, but Steve would never grow entirely used to that metal arm, or lose the faint twinge of guilt he felt whenever he saw it.
"Lukin spoke to me, before I killed him," Bucky said, slowly. "He asked me to shoot him quickly, to let him die as himself. I thought – I hoped – I was killing both of them. But Lukin was the one I saw when I looked into his eyes." He swore in Russian, crumpling the print-out into a ball. "How many times do I have to kill him?"
"I've been asking myself that for years," Steve said. He had never like killing people, had hoped never to have to do it again, after the war had ended, but for the Red Skull, he'd always been more than willing to make an exception. Red Skull had earned death multiple times over, before the end, but had always seemed to escape it at the last moment, generally leaving a trail of innocent corpses in his wake.
"Damnit," Nick muttered. "I really want to believe she's just looney tunes. If she's not, this just got a whole lot worse."
"Oh, she's that, too." Bucky made a face. "She really enjoys torturing people. Really, really enjoys it. Most people don't, not really, or if they do, it's the power they enjoy, not the opportunity to lick somebody else's blood off their fingers."
Sharon shook her head, a wisp of blonde hair that had escaped her tight ponytail falling into her face. "Does it really matter if it's her or him? Our people are just as dead either way. And either way, she won't stop until we capture her or kill her."
They were all talking about killing just a little too easily, Steve thought. That was what fighting the Red Skull did to you, even if it wasn't necessarily him anymore. "The Avengers have a lot on our plate at the moment," he said, hating the necessity of it. Chthon was a worse threat than Sin, even if the Red Skull was still present somehow. His own personal stake in the matter didn't change that. "I can't leave the team right now, not even for this. Not unless Sin starts spreading her attacks beyond SHIELD. But if you need me--"
"Don't worry," Nick said, with a familiar wolfish grin. "I'll let you know."
Sharon met his gaze, her eyes solemn; Steve suspected that she, too, was remembering listening to Bucky wheeze while the snake venom shut down his lungs. "So will we," she said, and it had the sound of a promise.
Bucky nodded, once, offering Steve a flash of the old, fierce grin that made him look younger, more like the kid Steve remembered; a 'we' from Sharon included him, now. He and Sharon had belonged to such different parts of Steve's life, until he'd woken up to discover the two of them had formed a relationship of their own without him.
Bucky was a capable, competent, deadly adult – had been all three of those things even when he'd still been a kid too young to vote – and Sharon was likewise a grown woman with a life of her own, but...
He couldn't protect them both from Sin and the potential threat of Red Skull and also lead the Avengers, and he'd already made his choice about which responsibility came firSt. That didn't make the idea of letting them face her on their own, of being only the back-up, called in 'if they needed him,' any easier.
He hugged both of them before he left, giving Bucky a clap on the back and letting Sharon go, gently, when she stiffened slightly in his arms. "I mean it, Sharon, James," and the look in Bucky's eyes was worth the effort it took not to call him by the only name Steve had ever known him by, "if you need me, then unless Chthon's broken free and about to destroy the world, I'll find a way to come."
Sharon smiled at him, taking away the sting of that unconscious flinch. "We know you will."
* * *
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
The last of the victims infected with the symbiote virus had just been sprayed with Hank's antidote and subdued when a fresh group of people climbed the steps out of the 59th Street subway station, several of them with shopping bags from earlier in the morning already in their hands.
*I thought the subway was being shut down,* Tony snapped over the police and emergency personnel frequencies he'd accessed via the Extremis. *Are the MTA shutting the subway down or not?* There were times when he hated trying to coordinate things with city authorities, especially now that he no longer had the authority of SHIELD to back him.
Most of the time, the city's police and emergency departments coped surprisingly well with supervillains, but there were times, like now, when the wheels of city bureaucracy turned much too slowly.
*Affirmative, Stark, the 59th Street and Lexington station is being shut down. All available units between Central Park South and Times Square, report to 59th and Lexington. Acknowledge.*
Tony tuned the radio chatter out as ambulances began reporting in, and gave his full attention to the two men and three women who had just exited the subway station, all of them writhing convulsively as sticky black goo began oozing over their skin. His helmet's air filters kept all foreign particles out, but if he'd taken it off, he knew the air would be heavy with the thick, cloying scent of cotton candy and burned sugar that always surrounded the Venom symbiote.
"Just stay calm, people." Steve stepped forward, raising the shield he had lowered when the last of the previous victims had slumped to the ground, fully human again. "You've been infected with an airborne toxin. Just stay still, and we'll get you the antidote." The breathing mask over his face muffled his voice, but he still managed to project calm authority.
The woman on the left dropped her Museum of Natural History giftshop bag onto the pavement, a pair of stuffed dinosaurs spilling out of it, and turned on Steve, hissing. The last few square inches of dark brown skin visible on her face disappeared beneath a wave of oily black, and eight inches of tongue lolled out of her mouth, twisting in midair like a snake's.
The two men were the last to succumb, their greater body mass buying them an extra half-second of cognizance – the older one, a white man with thinning hair and one of those omnipresent paint-splatter sweatshirts all the tourist shops sold, screamed hysterically as black goo crawled up his torso, the sound raw and grating.
As he stepped forward to seize the nearest victim by the arms, Tony spared a moment to be grateful that it was a weekday, and the city schools were in session at this time of year. Hank's antidote worked as well on children as adults, but subduing a child in order to spray anti-toxin in its face was far, far down on the list of things Tony ever wanted to do.
The woman struggled and clawed at him, preternaturally strong, but unskilled and completely out of control, and for a moment, he was back in the dining room of the Meridian, trying to prevent desperate, fear-crazed people from killing one another and unable to use his armor at more than a fraction of its capacity. The tiniest misjudgment could kill someone, break their neck, burn holes through them, and then the sticky-sugar smell his helmet was sealing out would be replaced by scorched meat.
The woman bucked violently, ripping herself free of his hold, and grabbed him by the throat, just below the bottom edge of his helmet – stupid, so stupid, letting himself get distracted that way – and then he was airborne.
Something hard slammed into his back, and bright lights flashed in his head.
Time lurched, like a DVD freezing and then skipping forwards. He was lying on the ground, the world at a 90-degree angle. Steve was charging at the woman, shield raised. Beyond him, Carol was struggling with the larger of the two men, arm locked around his neck in a hold that would have immobilized any normal human; the newly created symbiote howled and lashed out at her with sticky black pseudopods, pulling at the breathing mask on her face. Clint was pinned to the ground by a mass of writhing black, an impossibly wide, toothy jaw snapping at his throat.
Tony struggled to get up, struggled to breathe, his chest a tight knot of pain. For an endless moment, his lungs refused to work, and then he managed to suck in a shallow, ragged breath. The sharp, suffocating pain was immediately cut in half.
He shook his head, trying to force the high-pitched ringing noise out of his ears, and reached out for the bent remains of the lamppost he had hit, his gauntlet clinking dully against the metal. The armor's damage reports scrolled through his head as he pulled himself upright; it was barely dented.
Old Shellhead was a lot tougher than he was. He'd expended a lot of time and effort making it that way.
As he let go of the post and stepped toward the fight again, a tiny black shape dove for the man Carol was restraining. A cloud of white mist surrounded his head and shoulders, and then Jan was darting upwards again, easily evading the man's attempts to grab her with hands and prehensile tongue.
*Those tongues were disgusting the last time we fought these things, and they're still disgusting,* Jan muttered via the comlink.
*I think they get worse with repeated exposure,* Clint said. *Fuck, someone get this thing the hell off me. Falcon? Falcon, it's licking me. Spray it already!*
Steve hit one of the venom symbiotes in the face with his shield, sending it reeling back into Tony's waiting hands. He locked eyes with Tony over the thing's head for a fraction of a second, his gaze flicking from Tony to the bent lamppost, then turned away to help Clint. His hand latched onto the thing's shoulder – or what Tony thought was its shoulder – and yanked it backwards just in time to keep Clint's face intact.
The thing's jaws snapped shut on empty air, and then Sam dropped from the sky and hit it full-force, the momentum of the impact knocking it away from Clint. Sam thrust the canister of antidote in its face, only to be brought up short as its tongue wrapped around his wrist.
Tony tightened his grip on the violently struggling woman in his arms, ignoring the lingering dizziness and raw ache in his lungs that made each breath an effort. Jan was there like magic, probably evidence that he still wasn't tracking completely straight, and then the woman went limp, the black coating melting away to reveal a torn and rumpled business suit and short blonde hair spiky with the remains of the dissolving symbiote-substance.
It wasn't alive, unlike the real Venom and Carnage symbiotes, but a byproduct of the toxin, which contained protein compounds from one of the symbiotes as well as a cocktail of biological and chemical agents. It was a nasty piece of work, originally designed by Doom as a contact poison and refined by A.I.M. into a more easily controllable airborne compound that entered the body via the respiratory tract.
*Can you hurry it up up there, Goldilocks?* Jan asked, tone closer to an order than a question. *That was the last of my antidote.*
"But a moment more, and the vapors shall disperse." Thor didn't bother to use the comlink, his voice carrying easily over the noise of the fight and the drone of his spinning hammer even without it.
Tony lowered the unconscious woman gently to the ground, beside Carol's man and the limp form of the woman with the museum bag, looked up just in time to see Sam's canister of antidote hit the sidewalk with a clank.
Sam was beating at the symbiote with his wings and free hand both, yanking violently on the tongue still wrapped around his wriSt. Steve punched it in the kidneys, a hard jab that Tony could tell he pulled only slightly, and it howled, but kept its hands firmly locked around Sam's throat.
Clint had pushed himself to his feet, his hand moving automatically to his shoulder as if he were reaching for the quiver he wasn't wearing; he'd left the arrows in the quinjet, joking that the last thing he wanted was to be stabbed with one of his own weapons again.
The antidote skidded across the pavement, rolling toward the curb. Tony reached for it, and nearly overbalanced as the ground lurched under him. The canister skittered away from his fingers, his hands clumsy as they'd rarely been even when he'd been drinking. What the hell was wrong with him? He hadn't hit the lamppost hard enough to have a real concussion; he'd only been out for a few seconds.
He gritted his teeth and reached for it again, only to have it snatched out of his grasp by a blur of brown and white feathers.
With a harsh scream, Redwing launched himself into the air and dropped the canister into Carol's waiting hands. She sprayed it, covering Steve, Sam, and the sole remaining artificial symbiote indiscriminately with a white chemical mist, and the symbiote shuddered and went limp, gradually transforming back into a middle-aged tourist in a garish sweatshirt.
For a moment, everyone just stood there. Steve still held himself as if ready for an attack, whole body a study in coiled tension. Beside him, Sam rubbed at his throat with one hand, wincing.
Redwing landed on the unconscious man's chest, eyeing him first with one baleful golden eye, then the other; Tony wasn't sure if it was general suspicion, confusion over the fact that the monster of moments before was gone, or vengeful wrath because the man had tried to hurt Sam.
After a few long moments during which all of the victims of the toxin failed to move, Tony let himself relax, hunching forward to ease the ache in his lungs. Hank's antidote really did work, it seemed, even if the part of him that had seen one too many horror movies kept expecting one of the men or women who had been affected to suddenly sit up and try to bite someone.
His back throbbed hotly where he'd hit the lamppost; it was probably going to bruise. The armor made rubbing at the injury a useless gesture, but he did it anyway. Steve would probably tell him that bruises would remind him to pay more attention to the fight next time, and he'd be right. If he hadn't been wearing the armor, he could have broken his back.
"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, looking first to Sam, then Tony.
"No," Clint grumbled. He rubbed at the exposed parts of his face with one glove, trying to scrape off the saliva that covered it. "I nearly had my face bitten off. And I've got its spit all over me."
Sam swallowed. "I'm fine," he said, voice hoarse. He held up one wrist, and Redwing hopped up from his perch atop the unconscious man to land heavily on it, talons digging into Sam's thick leather glove.
"The city's going to want me to pay for that lamppost," Tony said. It wasn't an actual answer, but he wasn't sure he could give one right now. He wasn't actually injured, beyond the bruises, but there was definitely something wrong with him. Maybe he'd hit the lamppost harder than he'd thought.
The Extremis had healed his body completely when he acquired it, erasing all the old damage. A new heart to replace the mechanical one, a new liver to replace the one he'd tried to destroy, new lungs to take the place of ones scarred by pneumonia and damaged by years of improper bloodflow. His body could be injured, or worn out by too little sleep or too much stress, but he didn't get sick anymore, couldn't suffer from any kind of cumulative damage, except, apparently, for damage to the Extremis itself. He'd barely been using the Extremis during the fight, though, so it had to be the impact.
There ought to be some way to increase the armor's ability to absorb kinetic force. Steve's shield's ability to do the same was an inherent property of vibranium and thus not replicable, but there were other things he could do. Force shields were too much of an energy drain, but maybe...
Sam turned to stare at the damaged lamppost, his eyebrows going up. "If it had been one of the old, wrought-iron ones, it wouldn't have bent like that."
"My armor's a titanium-steel alloy. It would still have bent."
The whine of Thor's spinning hammer abruptly ceased, and Thor landed in the middle of the street with a thud Tony could feel in his bones. "The last of the vapors have dispersed. The air is once more safe to breathe."
The others immediately pulled their masks off, Jan returning to full size after she did so.
"Good work, guys," she said. "Who wants to stay and talk to the police and the press?" The Doppler sound of an ambulance siren nearly drowned out the end of her sentence, as the first of the crews of paramedics arrived, swerving carefully around Thor to pull up next to the curb.
Carol took a half-step forward. "I can do it; I don't mind talking to reporters."
Steve didn't even bother to volunteer – he and Sam were already talking to the ambulance crew. As Tony watched, he gestured to the fallen pedestrians with one hand, saying, "Some of them may have minor injuries. We tried to be careful when we restrained them, but—"
"It was like that fear toxin thing all over again, huh?" the EMT asked. He folded his skinny frame down to peer at one of the victims, frowning, then turned to his partner. "DeSoto, can I get some help with a stretcher?"
Tony opened a link to Steve's com unit, making sure to broadcast just to him. *I'll see you back at the Tower. Hank will want a report on how his antidote worked.* And Tony needed to go sit down somewhere before he keeled over in front of a bunch of emergency workers and in sight of at least two news helicopters, not to mention most of his teammates.
The dizziness and pain were fading, but he still felt shaky, and while he could put on a smile for reporters while far more seriously injured than this, the others more than had this one covered. They didn't need Tony here to pose for the cameras.
Steve turned to smile at him, that recruitment-poster perfect grin that always made Tony want to smile back, even when he couldn't. There was a tear through the leather fabric of his pants, halfway up his right thigh, but he looked otherwise untouched by the chaos of the past twenty minutes. From the easy set of his shoulder and the open happiness in that smile, he was pleased with the fight's outcome.
He ought to be; they had been lucky today, despite Tony's slip-up. No one had been seriously hurt, not even the people affected by the toxin. A.I.M., unfortunately, had used a timed smoke bomb to release the formula into the air, so they'd been denied the dubious pleasure of helping the police arrest Headcase twice in one month, but compared to A.I.M.'s last poison gas attack, this one had been easy. Should have been easy, if he hadn't been so tired, hadn't let himself get distracted.
The gas main explosion three days ago had not been easy, and the subway accident yesterday had been an ugly, messy disaster all around – the Avengers hadn't been called in on that one, but it had been the top news item on every local news feed Tony had open until half an hour ago, when the venom symbiotes rampaging down Lexington Avenue had replaced it. Keeping all the datafeeds open made his head ache, the stab of pain over his left eye a familiar presence by now, but it was necessary.
Spiderman claimed to have broken up twice as many muggings in the past week as usual, and according to Luke Cage and Daredevil, there'd been an increase in domestic violence incidents throughout Hell's Kitchen, with the worst of the fights taking place the closest to St. Margaret's Cathedral. Chthon's presence was poisoning the city, slowly but surely.
They needed to stay on the ball. And they needed to keep public confidence in superheroes high, or the tension caused by Chthon and the apparently steadily increasing power leakage from spear would find a new outlet.
Tony hadn't sacrificed his integrity, his reputation, half his friendships, and far too many people's lives to have anti-superhuman sentiment break out all over again. Not when they'd finally managed to turn the tide of public opinion and get Registration repealed.
"I don't think I like this new A.I.M.," Clint commented. "It used to take MODOK at least a week to get his plans in motion after a jailbreak."
"That's because MODOK had plans," Tony said. With his helmet on, he didn't have to try to cover his exhaustion or add animation to his voice – the helmet's voice modulators covered a multitude of sins. "I'm not sure Maddigan does." A.I.M. had never had much in the way of discernible goals, aside from the pursuit of ever-fancier ways to destroy things via cutting edge science, but lately their plans had been even more random than usual, as if they'd switched from the pursuit of knowledge and weapons development at all cost to pure promotion of anarchy for anarchy's sake.
"He doesn't," Carol said. "Jessica's done some digging on him – he's pretty much A.I.M.'s puppet, more of a figurehead than an actual leader. Whatever they did to him to keep him, well, alive's as good a term as any... his sanity didn't come through the experience intact. Not that he was all that sane to begin with," she added.
"We weren't great at plans, when we were his age." Clint shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. I think you and Spiderwoman should keep an eye on him. Sanity is optional for supervillains." He glanced back over his shoulder to where Thor and Jan were talking to two uniformed policemen and a woman with a microphone and a plastic smile. "Jan's waving at you," he added. "I think you're on deck."
Carol ran one hand through her hair, and tugged her sagging left glove back up her arm. "Reporters aren't really that hard to talk to, you know. It's all in how you spin it. You just have to be careful what you let them see." She strode towards the camera confidently, the two-inch heels of her boots striking hard against the pavement. Tony had seen runway models display less poise.
"Are you waiting to go back with the Quinjet, or do you want a lift back to the tower?" he asked, turning to Clint.
Clint shook his head slightly. "Considering how lovey-dovey it looks when any of you guys fly while carrying someone, and considering the camera crews right over there and how much fun the media had debating whether or not you'd ever slept with Henry Hellrung, I think I'll wait for the Quinjet."
Even after years' worth of experience trying to manage his public image, there were still moments when the need to constantly worry over what the media would think got extremely annoying. Especially when other people worried about it for him. "Just because you know those rumors are true doesn't mean the rest of the country doesn't think they were all baseless tabloid speculation," Tony said, not bothering to keep the irritation from his voice. It survived the voice modulation loud and clear. "No one will think you've caught slutty bisexual cooties from me."
"Wait, they're true? You and Simon's new boyfriend actually-" Clint made a vague hand gesture that could have encompassed anything from sex to Parcheesi.
"According to reliable sources." Tony had been drinking heavily enough by that point that he didn't remember much, beyond the fact that he'd thought Henry's initial greeting – "Hi, I'm Henry Hellrung, and I'm going to be playing you on television," – had been a clever joke.
"That's creepy."
Tony rolled his eyes, secure in the knowledge that no one could see his face. "There are times when you're even less mature than Spiderman, Hawkeye." He probably should have been amused by it; people had been reacting to his sex life with everything from envy to disgust since he'd been seventeen. He didn't feel like being amused; his head hurt, his chest hurt, and reporters were starting to cast glances in their direction.
He sent one more silent status update to Steve's communicator, and fired his boot jets.
Steve studied the image on the screen in front of him; the security camera still was blurry and pixilated, but he didn't need to see the woman in the picture's face to recognize her. The way she held herself, the gun she carried, the knife strapped to the outside of her thigh would have been enough even without the blurred glimpse of curly hair.
He didn't need to look to Sharon for confirmation – which begged the question; why had Nick actually called him to the Helicarrier today? Sharon, too, would have known the woman's identity as soon as she saw her, making Steve's ID unnecessary.
"Sin," he said. "It's definitely her. And at least one of the men she had with her when she attacked Bucky and Sharon – you can see part of his arm just inside the frame, there."
"Oh, we knew that," Nick said. "She left three men alive at the third installation she attacked. I didn't call ya up here for an identification. I was hopin' ya might have some idea of what the hell it is she wants." He stabbed an unlit cigar at the picture, using it like a pointer. "That was taken four days ago, at a SHIELD R&D facility in Jersey. Everyone in the facility was killed. We kept it off the news, and the same for the one before that, but we're not goin' to be able to keep last night's attack quiet. Which comin' on top of getting a Helicarrier blown to hell and gone last spring, is going to have Washington on our necks. Again. We need answers, people."
Bucky shrugged one shoulder – the right one, the one that was still flesh and blood. "She wants revenge. It's not complicated; we killed Crossbones, and his death wasn't pretty, or easy." The dark circles that had still smudged his eyes the last time Steve had seen him were gone; he looked fully recovered from the snake venom now, and though there were probably still bandages hiding under his clothing, you couldn't tell it from the way he moved. Seeing him now did a little to ease the memory of him leaning on Sharon, his side covered in blood, but not enough. It had taken half an hour for Steve to get all the blood off the kitchen table, counter, and floor. They had thrown the ruined, blood-stained dishtowel away.
Nick gave him a flat look. "Yeah, but why now? And why bother with those men when it's the people right here in this room that she wants? Little Miss Crazy's always been the impulsive type. These attacks are targeted, planned. Without Daddy to hold her leash, who's givin' her orders?"
"The voices in her head," Sharon muttered. Then, slightly louder and with significantly less sarcasm, "When she fought us, she kept saying, 'You killed me, you killed Brock, I'll make you pay,' over and over. She may not have any endgame beyond causing as much damage to SHIELD as possible, and with James up here recovering from her poison, any SHIELD employee might do as a temporary substitute."
"It's a little more complicated than that." Nick slid three pieces of paper across the conference table, one to each of them. "This is a transcript of her conversation with one of the men she very pointedly didn't kill last night. The part that starts with 'We are coming for ya, Fury,' is particularly interesting."
"Like I said," Nick went on, as Steve took the paper and quickly scanned its contents, "we know she wants revenge. What we need to know is what she thinks she's doing, and who she's doin' it for."
The transcript had several lines of asterisk symbols scattered through it, where portions of the conversation had not been picked up by the microphone, but the important part had been perfectly audible.
"We are coming for you, Fury. For you, and for Barnes, and Rogers, and Carter. You will pay for the good men you have killed, and the plans you have ruined. The Red Skull is coming for you. Daddy and I are going to make you all beg for mercy before you die."
God damnit, they had killed Red Skull. Even dead twice over, he was still reaching out from his well-deserved grave to try and destroy people Steve loved.
What hold had he had over Sin, that she would carry on fighting for his warped cause even after his death, to the point where she tried to become the father who had used and tortured and brainwashed her?
Unless... Steve shoved the thought away. Sin couldn't have meant that bit about 'Daddy and I' literally. Red Skull was dead. He had to be dead.
"Interesting." Sharon's voice was serious, with the slightest hint of something that might have been skepticism, or might have been unease. "She's probably delusional, but... when Red Skull was killed the first time, everyone in this room saw his corpse. SHIELD autopsied it. I touched it. And then he showed up in Alexander Lukin's body."
Nick gestured with his unlit cigar, the motion encompassing all of them. "I want your honest opinion. Do you think there's any chance that she's not just talkin' metaphors? That Red Skull really is still around somehow, and in contact with her?"
"No," Sharon was shaking her head. "The first time he died, the cosmic cube was right there. He was able to use it to transfer his consciousness. The second time, there was no way for him to escape. We checked Lukin's body; the cube wasn't there."
Steve was tempted to agree with her – surely even the Red Skull only got so many opportunities to cheat death – but there had been those last few moments before his second, final death when Lukin had been in control of his body again. Had approaching death given him the strength to seize control from Red Skull one last time, or had Red Skull already been gone? It was a question that had haunted Steve, at first, but as the summer had passed without any sign that Red Skull's death had been anything other than permanent, he had let himself relax, let himself believe, finally, that the Red Skull was truly dead and gone.
"It wouldn't be the first time he's cheated death," he said, reluctantly. "It does seem unlikely, though."
Bucky frowned down at the note in his hand, the paper white against stainless steel fingers. The black SHIELD uniform had finally stopped making him look like a stranger, but Steve would never grow entirely used to that metal arm, or lose the faint twinge of guilt he felt whenever he saw it.
"Lukin spoke to me, before I killed him," Bucky said, slowly. "He asked me to shoot him quickly, to let him die as himself. I thought – I hoped – I was killing both of them. But Lukin was the one I saw when I looked into his eyes." He swore in Russian, crumpling the print-out into a ball. "How many times do I have to kill him?"
"I've been asking myself that for years," Steve said. He had never like killing people, had hoped never to have to do it again, after the war had ended, but for the Red Skull, he'd always been more than willing to make an exception. Red Skull had earned death multiple times over, before the end, but had always seemed to escape it at the last moment, generally leaving a trail of innocent corpses in his wake.
"Damnit," Nick muttered. "I really want to believe she's just looney tunes. If she's not, this just got a whole lot worse."
"Oh, she's that, too." Bucky made a face. "She really enjoys torturing people. Really, really enjoys it. Most people don't, not really, or if they do, it's the power they enjoy, not the opportunity to lick somebody else's blood off their fingers."
Sharon shook her head, a wisp of blonde hair that had escaped her tight ponytail falling into her face. "Does it really matter if it's her or him? Our people are just as dead either way. And either way, she won't stop until we capture her or kill her."
They were all talking about killing just a little too easily, Steve thought. That was what fighting the Red Skull did to you, even if it wasn't necessarily him anymore. "The Avengers have a lot on our plate at the moment," he said, hating the necessity of it. Chthon was a worse threat than Sin, even if the Red Skull was still present somehow. His own personal stake in the matter didn't change that. "I can't leave the team right now, not even for this. Not unless Sin starts spreading her attacks beyond SHIELD. But if you need me--"
"Don't worry," Nick said, with a familiar wolfish grin. "I'll let you know."
Sharon met his gaze, her eyes solemn; Steve suspected that she, too, was remembering listening to Bucky wheeze while the snake venom shut down his lungs. "So will we," she said, and it had the sound of a promise.
Bucky nodded, once, offering Steve a flash of the old, fierce grin that made him look younger, more like the kid Steve remembered; a 'we' from Sharon included him, now. He and Sharon had belonged to such different parts of Steve's life, until he'd woken up to discover the two of them had formed a relationship of their own without him.
Bucky was a capable, competent, deadly adult – had been all three of those things even when he'd still been a kid too young to vote – and Sharon was likewise a grown woman with a life of her own, but...
He couldn't protect them both from Sin and the potential threat of Red Skull and also lead the Avengers, and he'd already made his choice about which responsibility came firSt. That didn't make the idea of letting them face her on their own, of being only the back-up, called in 'if they needed him,' any easier.
He hugged both of them before he left, giving Bucky a clap on the back and letting Sharon go, gently, when she stiffened slightly in his arms. "I mean it, Sharon, James," and the look in Bucky's eyes was worth the effort it took not to call him by the only name Steve had ever known him by, "if you need me, then unless Chthon's broken free and about to destroy the world, I'll find a way to come."
Sharon smiled at him, taking away the sting of that unconscious flinch. "We know you will."
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven
no subject
no subject
Hopefully, we won't keep you in suspense quite as long, this time.