Avengers: The Deep (1/1)
Title: The Deep
Author: schmevil
Fandom: Mighty Avengers
Summary: Once upon a midnight dreary...
Character(s): Tony, Carol, Bob
Word count: 5,907
Warnings: Graphic violence, dead Steve
Notes: freakydarling was indispensable. Written for the cap_ironman Halloween challenge, for the prompt 'ghostly revenge'. The story is basically gen, though it's possible to read it as Steve/Tony and/or Carol/Tony.
Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. Systems are shot, the sensors are giving him gibberish, but he’s been falling-drifting, dead weight-falling for a while. Exact numbers. He tries to push them aside. Mac versus PC. Captain Crunch cereal. The word of the day is GENERATOR.
Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. The outer shell is compromised and he’s never worst case scenario-ed extremis for the Mariana Trench. At 35,810 feet, the pressure is 16,000 pounds per square inch; the water is less than a degree off of freezing. The water isn’t even water. It’s ooze. Will he even be able to see?
He got a pretty good handle on the damage before the armor went to basic. He can move inside the armor, a little. He’s got enough wiggle room to rub his toes, covered in the undersheath, across the inside of the armor. The dent is obvious, to him at least. Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. He can calculate to within a very small margin of error how long he has.
He smells his sweat, but that’s all. It’s gone sour after so long-one mississippi, two mississippi, thr-not quite dry against his skin. His reflection is gone from the face plate. There’s no light, nothing since the readouts stopped. No sound except his breathing. The ocean is so vast, and out here so under-populated, that he could fall for hours without making any new friends.
Until the armor starts to vent. Then he won’t be alone.
Mostly the ocean looks like nothing. Grey nothing. So he’s left with himself. Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. It’s cold. It shouldn’t be cold, not yet. Are the systems failing? His breathing-he has to conserve his air supply-is it elevated? Ignore it. Block it out, just-- Fifteen pounds. He took damage in the fight. It could be shock, and not the armor. Extremis tells him nothing. The connections are all dead, but he can’t stop worrying them, feeling them like a phantom limb. Is that blood? Per square inch, every thirty feet.
He’s nudged. He’s been falling so long it’s turning into sensory deprivation, and a couple of times he fooled himself; tricked himself into thinking there was something-no one is coming-but this is real, he thinks. Fifteen pounds. Fifteen. He’s nudged again. The faint tug of gravity shifts. Something pushing him from behind and below. He can’t see it, can’t see anything.
There’s a shadow, just beyond the faceplate. Hands, closing on him. He shouldn’t feel them, not through the armor, but they feel warm; pulling him up, too fast. But with no light, how is he seeing the outline of a man? Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. Reverse that, see how the body copes. Is this real?
The face-the shadow of the man gets clearer, as his breathing gets harder-it’s not his, not his reflection, but he knows it. Lit somehow, like he has his own star. Blonde hair, whipped back from his face. Blue eyes, steady on his. It’s a little fuzzy, the name; as if just slightly out of his memory’s reach. “Tony,” Bob says. Two syllables, easy to read on his lips. Real, he decides.
“The pressure.”
Bob smiles at him, a little uneven. He hasn’t quite figured out reassuring yet. That’s why they keep him away from the civilians.
“The pressure! You have to slow down.” He shouldn’t say so much. There’s no way Bob can read his lips. But maybe he can hear him. Does his particular iteration of super-hearing work this deep? “Bob!” He just smiles. Keeps on smiling. Blue eyes, so clear, steady on his. So clear, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“The pressure, you have to stop!” The blue eyes; he sees them double now, his own laid over Bob’s. His reflection is back, courtesy of the glow Bob is generating. His own, pupils wide, and beneath them Bob’s, clearest blue with the tiniest pinprick of black, dark as a starless sky. Empty.
“Bob!” He tries to move his armored limbs. With the main systems down it’s useless-he only manages to knock up against the inside of the armor. It sends a jolt of pain down his spine and he’s reminded of every injury. He feels it again, the hot trickle of blood. It’s worth the pain, if Bob notices. If he gets it.
For a second, Tony thinks he doesn’t. Nothing in his eyes change. Nothing changes, except he’s not as warm, like someone opened a window, and his body heat is being leeched out into the night air.
He’s cold, really cold, finally feeling the deep. He hears... something. “Bob?” Not breathing, but like it. Steady. He’s so cold-water?
“Bob!” he screams. The hands go hot on his biceps-burning-the only part of him that feels anything, and then they close. The fingers close tight around the armor; tear through it like it’s gold lief and not steel-adamantium. The water-
“Wake up!”
Warm hands on his biceps, holding him gently. Blue eyes, warm in the light of his bedside lamp.
His lips open. Half of him, still asleep, thinks to scream. Instead he gasps for air, choking on it like he’s forgotten how.
“Easy,” Carol says.
He takes another breath. Holds it a second before breathing out, forcing his body to relax. He stops the shaking by willing it, but no way it’s before she notices. As soon as he can, he says, “Shit.”
“Sounded like a bad one,” she says, almost casually; as if she’s not in her boss’s bedroom, in the middle of the night, watching him recover from a nightmare. Of course she’s also his friend, one of the best.
“It...was nothing.” He looks down, to her hands, half concealed by an over-long USAF shirt. They immediately drop to her lap. The skin of her legs, hardly covered by her shorts, is raised in goosebumps. “I didn’t know you still got cold.”
“I don’t, usually. It’s probably psychosomatic.” Carol gets up from the bed, and turns from him to the window that runs the length of the room, ceiling to floor. It’s lead grey outside, and matte from the heavy cloud cover, but the city lends enough illumination for Tony to see the snow. Thick streaks of white.
“Anyway, I just came up to return your book.” She looks back, over her shoulder, to his bedside table. His battered copy of Ideas and Opinions sits precariously, ready to fall off the edge. She doesn’t say that she must have heard something, to come into his bedroom. His library/office is on the other end of the hall.
Tony pushes off the covers and sits up. He reaches over and pushes the book more solidly onto the table.
“Thanks,” he says, feeling he should say more. She looks away. She doesn’t hug herself, or put her hands on her hips- just stands there, plainly, exuding the confidence he wishes he could recall. It’s Carol though, and he knows what’s underneath that isn’t so cool. If there was anyone he could talk to-
He gets up and looks for his discarded socks. The floor is just cool enough to be uncomfortable.
“Hey, don’t let me keep you up.”
“No, I’m up now.”
“I was going to microwave myself some milk. Sounds cliché, but you want some?”
Tony rubs the sleep out of his eyes, trying to banish the dream with it. “Throw in a cookie and I’m sold.” He finds the socks hiding halfway under the bed, and pulls them on one-handed, using the other for balance, still sleep-stupid. “Listen, I’ll meet you in the kitchen. I just need the bathroom.”
He looks up in time to see the concern she doesn’t do a good job of hiding. “I’ll go fire up the microwave.”
He turns on the light before he even gets to the bathroom, and checks the security cameras with less than his full attention. Quick glance through the lower levels. The empty rooms on the Avengers’ level. Ignores the Watchtower. It’s easier not to test CLOC.
He hates to look at himself in the mirror, but this time he can’t help himself. Everything in its usual order. Tony turns on the tap and forces himself to look down at the water.
“Shit.” He takes a second to laugh at himself, then cups his hands to splash his face.
His apartment is dark, and he purposely takes his time in heading down to the kitchen. By the time he gets there, Carol’s got two mugs of steaming milk ready, and a plate of shortbread cookies, one of which she’s already munching on.
Tony props an elbow on the table and rests his chin in the palm of his hand. “I didn’t know we had shortbread,” he says around a yawn.
“Jarvis is probably hiding them from you.”
“That is completely unjustified.” He snags two biscuits and gets a raised eyebrow for his trouble.
“You ate the last package before anyone even knew they were in the house.”
“I was hungry. They were the first things I found.”
Carol rolls her eyes. “You could give a dietician a heart attack.” She settles back into a slouch, her legs wide, and her mug cradled in her hands.
There are no windows in the kitchen but past Carol, he sees the common room-what used to be the living room-and outside it’s still coming down hard. He’s got his back to the wall and he can see both the exits, but Carol sat down first. Maybe it’s a soldier’s way of calming down a friend who’s hysterical from a nightmare. A few minutes of awkward small talk-“these are good cookies” “aren’t they?” “look at it come down” -and they’re settling into an even more awkward silence.
“Listen,” she says. “You don’t have to say anything, and I don’t have to ask.” ‘But you’ve been doing this a lot lately’, is what goes unsaid. It’s not the first time she’s been there when he’s started out of a nightmare. It’s the first time she’s had to wake him, though.
Carol’s got more than enough fodder for nightmare’s herself, and back when they used to talk more, when they both went to regular meetings, she’d tell him about hers. Being caught in a firefight without a weapon. Hands, always hands.
“It’s just...” She waits patiently, even though she’s not patient by nature. She’s a good friend, he thinks.
Shop talk-he could do an end run around this whole thing by bringing up the meeting first thing Monday morning. All the SHIELD department heads and sub-directors. The budget. Just the kind of thing Carol, and he-admit it-hate. Or he could be straight with her.
“Drowning. Lately, it’s always drowning.” She keeps on waiting, face carefully neutral. He looks down to his milk. There are crumbs crusted around the edges of the mug. This should be easier.
“One time I had the same nightmare every night for a month,” she finally says. Making it easy on him. “It was after Afghanistan. After I was cleared for active duty.” He remembers Afghanistan. She crashed during a recon, in hostile territory, in his plane. His precious new prototype.
He remembers the sick irony of putting someone else behind enemy lines, in the hands of terrorists.
“I didn’t dream about the torture. Maybe my mind couldn’t deal and needed a break from it. Maybe I was really over it.” She pauses, for a long moment. Lost somewhere in her memory. “I used to dream about the cell. Like, what if it wasn’t just a couple of days? What if I never got out?”
Tony swallows hard, looks up-has to force himself to meet her gaze.
“A rat in a cage, with only other rats for company.” She stops there. Carol’s already seen his worst, and he’s seen hers. All he has to do now is talk about his dreams.
“I’m alone. Until-”
“Something comes?”
“Yeah.” He laughs at himself. “This time it was Bob.”
“Your nightmare is Bob?”
He leans in, grinning. “Shh, he might hear you.” The both laugh. Bob probably hears that, too. He doesn’t care, though; it’s like the tension melts out of him, and for a long while they just sit together. Polishing off the cookies. He has a sneaking suspicion they’re Jan’s. Not that she’d ever admit to shortbread binges.
He’s comfortable like this, just the two of them. He forgot this. So it surprises him when she brings it up again.
“So, why water? Why are you dreaming about drowning?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and he doesn’t really want to. “Listen, I don’t-” She cuts him off.
“Anything significant happen in your life lately, relating to water?”
He puts down his mug and half-eaten cookie. She laughs.
“I’m teasing you. I shouldn’t, I know. It’s cruel.”
“No, you shouldn’t.” And you wouldn’t, not about this.
“Rat in a cage. Tin soldier drowning in the deep. Is that all I am to you Tony? A reflection of some part of yourself?”
“Carol, what the hell?” A spike of adrenaline goes through him. Is he still dreaming? But no, the crack in the tiles in front of the fridge, cookie crumbs scattered around his chair-it’s too real. Too ordinarily ugly. There are other things this could be.
He still has access to the Avengers database. (He built that database, with Vision. He’s dreamt about it before, hasn’t he? So familiar). He needs to know what he’s facing.
“Who are you?”
“Oh Tony, is it so hard to believe that your cute blonde sidekick doesn’t want to play nice anymore? I’ve always had a nasty streak.”
Looks like Carol, sounds like Carol, but manifestly not her. Unless she’s possessed.
“That’s what I am, isn’t it? Tony 2.0? Or should I say 3.0-you’ve already remade yourself. On the sixth day, Stark created man.”
She waves a hand. The data streams go static, a few seconds of white noise, on a thousand different signals, straight to his brain. His vision almost goes with it. He shakes it off. Concentrates on the chair, the table, her body.
He has to force his voice even. “You’re obviously not Carol, so what the hell are you?”
“A little bit of you; a little bit of him.” No, he thinks. Whatever this is, it’s bullshitting him.
“Maria said I was your favorite blonde, but I’m not sure that’s right. Favorite living blonde maybe. You do seem to have a weakness for us.”
“Shut up,” he says, regretting the words before he’s even done forming them.
She laughs again. It’s nothing like Carol’s easy laugh, and she sees it, what it does to him. She just laughs harder. Her mouth-
He stands up, throwing his chair back into the wall. He can see every exit, but she’s between them and her. The armor. Not responding. Down with everything else.
She could be jamming the signal. Or none of this could be happening at all. He starts running down the list. Technological maybe. Or magic, he hates magic.
Not-Carol is still loose, still comfortable in her chair. Tony’s chair, in his kitchen. He designed it, knows everything in it, except how to use the appliances. He starts looking for a weapon. The digital readouts that grace nearly everything in his place flash 00:00 and then die. He eyes the frying pan, drying in the sink-there’s always blunt force trauma. But he needs to know if it’s in her body.
She smiles again. Puts down her mug and leans her elbows on her knees. The body language-it’s Carol’s.
“It was a sweet ceremony.” She pushes her chair back and gets up, and slowly starts moving toward him. If this is Carol, under some kind of control, if this thing has her powers, there’s nothing he can do without the armor. And it it’s not-It’s cut the signals. He doesn’t know what it is.
“Committing him to the sea. Better than that pathetic display at his funeral." Carol wasn’t there, with the founding Avengers, when they put him back into the ice. This thing, it knows things she doesn’t. Things that no one does.
And it wants him to know that.
“Did you know,” she lowers her voice. “That they were all laughing at you. Crying like a widow.” She giggles. Shit, like Cassie when she was younger. She doesn’t laugh like that anymore, but he remembers it.
“Oh sweetie, not another one. Don’t you think she’s a little young for you?”
He reaches over and grips the frying pan. She grins again, mouth wide, wider than it has any right to be, and inside-
“You don’t get to talk about her.”
Not-Carol charges, and she’s on him, fast like Carol is. He’s already swinging when that screaming mouth, (wide and black, like a starless sky), is before him. Salt, he smells salt. Something burnt. Before he can place it, she’s moving again, evading his attack easily. He’s too slow, even with extremis.
She screams again, and he can’t see, can’t look-
Her hands on his body, cold enough to burn; like his skin is turning to ice. He brings the pan up again, with everything he has, against the base of her skull. That shuts her up. She stumbles away from him, pained.
“Get out of her face.”
She looks up at him through bloody hair, stuck in pieces to her face. “Tony?” she asks softly. “What’s going on?”
It sounds just like her; like that time in Seattle, when she begged him for help.
“Tony.”
“Don’t make me tell you again.” He tests the weight of the skillet in his hands. Jarvis likes to make grilled cheese sandwiches in it; 12” of cast iron stopping power. She’s shut down the data streams, his armor-his options are getting thin.
She laughs again. He’s tired of hearing it. “If this is real, why don’t you call for help? Bob’s just upstairs.” If this is real, then he’s already heard and can’t get to him, or she’s blocking him. If this is real, then Carol will forgive him.
“Help, bitch.” She doesn’t like that.
She screams, and it’s like the white noise that’s still in his head; like his eardrums are shredding, and soon he feels it more than hears it. She opens her mouth wide, and the black of it, what’s in it-his mind tries to get away from it, he’s losing his grip, but he needs to know-is spreading. He can’t see past the black.
“I said, get out!” Did he speak? All he can hear is ringing, and his muscles, everything feels like ice. Doesn’t matter. She’ll hear him anyway.
Something. Something is coming. If it’s real, she’s superhuman, she’ll forgive him. Something-
Vision blazes back, and Carol’s there, in her flight suit, hair pulled back. A foot away from him with her hand extended, like the first time he ever saw her. Not real. Not real, he tells himself. At least not this. Closes the slight distance between them and brings the skillet down across her face.
She hits the floor with a wet thud, and doesn’t move.
Her blonde hair is a crown over her bloody face; a pool of spilt honey. The ratty sleep-shirt she’s had since the academy is ruined now. He takes a few cautious steps towards the body. It doesn’t move.
Tony feels for the armor. Nothing but white noise. It’s sharper this time, when he reaches for a connection. He pulls away from it. “Whatever you are, you’re not going to win this.”
“I already have,” says a dead man from behind him.
He doesn’t turn, doesn’t look away from the body. It’s-He’s behind him. Right behind him. Tony can feel the hot breath on his neck.
Tony wants nothing more than to close his eyes. He doesn’t. “How do you figure that?”
“You won the battle but you didn’t win the war.” The dead man sidles closer. Tony’s peripheral vision catches a mail-covered shoulder; white and red leather. The scent of the ocean. “How are you going to do that,” he whispers into Tony’s ear. “When you want to trade places with me? When you’d rather be here, down among the dead men?”
“You’re not him.”
“A little bit of you; a little bit of me.” Leather-covered fingers close around his wrist. “It doesn’t have to be hard.”
“What do you want?”
“Just your life.”
Tony tightens his grip on the pan. “You don’t even sound like him.”
“Let go, Tony.” Let go. Dead hands on him, only a few degrees off of freezing, but the breath is hot. Let go. The pain, he realizes, is gone. He feels nothing, and there’s no white noise.
“Seriously,” he says, like he’s shooting down a bad pitch. “Even Simon does a better Cap.” The fingers tighten, for just a moment, on his wrist. Tight enough that his knees almost buckle. He feels the skillet drop from his fingers. “Have you heard Simon’s Cap? It’s terrible. But yours is actually worse.”
Tony’s spun around until he’s facing the dead man, cold hands burning his shoulders again. The cowl’s pushed back so Tony can see the face, Steve’s face. Perfect except for the bullet holes in his neck, and pale skin; so pale it’s nearly blue, and shot through with bright veins. He doesn’t want to look, so he does. He stares. Whatever this is, it’s not Steve. His friend is dead. At the bottom of the ocean.
“You’re a few months late with this. I’ve already been haunted.”
The black of those eyes, it’s not empty, there’s- “nothing you can do to me.” Tony shakes off its grip and pulls away. The white noise comes crashing back. The pain almost blinds him. He lets it wash over him.
“Want to bet?” asks the monster in Steve’s skin. It grins. That black grin spreads across Steve’s face, the skin buckling, folding back as it grows.
“Double or nothing.” He turns and runs, almost trips over Carol’s body, on his way out of the kitchen. He makes his way by memory. Vision’s unreliable.
Behind him, too close behind him, he hears it. “You can’t outrun me, Tony.” All pretense of being Carol or Bob, or Steve is gone. The voice is like rocks grinding, deep underwater. Every syllable is too long; hits him like it’s trying to grind his bones with speech alone.
He hears it following him. Too close. It sounds wet; like-he tries to push the thought away-like it’s shedding skin. Steve’s skin. Tony knocks a side table down behind him. A dining room chair. “Where’re you gonna go?”
It’s gaining on him.
The pain, he thinks. He takes hold of it, pushes his body through it, even as it tries to shut down. Sensory overload is about two steps away, but so is the window. He keeps his body running and opens his mind to the white noise. Then he reaches.
“Tony!”
It almost sounds worried, he thinks, in the moment he has before his body hits the glass. Then he’s through, falling in a hail of light. No snow, no lead-grey sky-just sunlight, hot and bright. Behind him, it’s screaming; still screaming in his head.
He feels the empty shell of where the data streams and armor should be, past the noise. Where is it? He’s falling. Falling again. Fifteen pounds per square inch. The pressure. Slow down. Slow down. Your life, Tony. Only your life.
There.
The armor reforms around him, plating moving smoothly back into place. “There you are, baby.” He hits the jet boots, and rotates 180 degrees, repulsors already raised to hit that thing.
Only, there’s just a hole in Stark Tower, where the glass of the living room window was, and nothing coming for him. “Where...?”
“Tony!” He turns to see Carol flying beside him in full costume, palms open. Saying with her body, ‘easy, easy.’
Is this real? There’s nothing in her eyes but her. Please. It feels real, but so did Not-Carol, the cookies and milk. Glass is still falling from the window frame, a few last lingering pieces. If the glass is real, if he’s real, if any of this is, then some of that was real too.
The armor tells him he was in his bedroom, then the bathroom and the kitchen. Everything’s a jumble, the readings all mixed up; as if the heat sensors are trying to measure sound; aural sensors trying to analyze light. Before that, there’s a gap in recording, and before that there’s just the mission. Yesterday’s mission. He takes a chance.
“Carol?”
“Look at your chest.”
He does. A black thing, part flight recorder, part spider, is secured to the chestplate. Its feelers-tentacles? -are sunk right into the armor. “The hell?” He could blast it off with the unibeam, but that might take the rest of the armor, and him, with it. “Carol, can you-”
“Hang on!”
Then Bob, moving in a blur that the armor can almost track but his eyes can’t, is coming at him; bright like a star, and hands outstretched. Before Tony can fully register his presence, Bob’s reaching for the black thing, and pulling it off. For something less than a second, before he’s free of it, Tony can see into it. He falls.
Carol catches him before he can go very far. “Are you ok?”
“I...” She stares into the faceplate, like she can actually discern something from a blank metal facade. She can’t though. “I will be.”
“Well, good. Can you fly on your own?”
He tests his connection to the armor. He’s going to run about a thousand diagnostics and make a whole new chestplate, but everything else is reading normal. “I think so, yeah.”
“Then let’s go back up to the living room, until Bob’s back from throwing that thing into the sun.” They fly toward the window, Carol bringing up the rear. He doesn’t mind that she’s watching him.
“What’s up with him and the sun?” he asks weakly, as they fly through the window he apparently did smash through, moments ago. Once he lands, he dissolves the armor, and stumbles over to the couch. Carol crouches in front of him. There are bits of glass in her hair.
“Everyone has their thing. Can you get rid of the sheath?” He pulls it back into his body. It’s not the first time he’s sat on his couch naked, but usually that kind of thing happens under better circumstances. He laughs at that, at himself. Not even the nervous hitch that’s obvious in it seems to faze her.
“What’s yours?”
She pauses in her examination to look up, embarrassed. “...cars.” By this, and not by poking at his battered, naked body.
“You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.”
“Maybe after we get you checked out and make sure there are no more spider-boxes lying in wait.”
He looks around the battered suite; chairs knocked over and scorch marks on the floor. He’s set enough things on fire to know chemical burns when he sees them. “The glass-”
“Don’t worry. Jan and Simon are on crowd control. Natasha and Ares went after the delivery guy.”
“Delivery guy?” He pictures some poor Dominos driver, hunted down by the Black Widow and the God of War. It’s not pretty.
“You don’t remember?” Tony shakes his head, no. “I think you’ll make it until Reed shows up.” Carol rises out of her crouch and settles beside him on the couch, not too close. Tony covers himself with the sheath again, and checks on Reed-traces him to the Fantisticar, along with Sue, on their way here. He finds Simon and Jan through the building’s security cameras. Simon has the crowd in hand. He’s signing autographs and posing for pictures-whatever panic that another Avengers crisis might have sparked is gone. Jan’s handling the official response.
Natasha and Ares are harder to track. There aren’t enough CCTV cameras in the city to make it easy. He could start tapping satellites, but the lingering headache, like a technological hangover, makes it an unappealing prospect. He looks at Carol, sitting beside him, her red sash bunched unflatteringly at her waist, glass in her hair, and black smudges on her face. Watching him, and trying to look cool while doing it, but he can see the twist of concern at her mouth. Her eyes, framed by the domino mask, are worried; unsure.
“You have glass in your hair.”
“Oh damn.” she says, and shakes it out, artlessly graceful.
“So somebody sent me a spider... box… thing that wanted to eat my brain?”
“It wanted to eat your brain?” Tony starts. He didn’t hear Bob touch down. Bob looks a little worse for wear, hair mussed and costume torn, but well enough.
“That was the general impression I got.”
“Well,” he says, a little smug. “I don’t think it will have much success with that from inside the sun. Are you...?”
“Dr. Danvers says I’ll hold up until Reed gets here.” Bob’s glowing a little, literally. One of his comparatively minor powers that most people, even most heroes would be jealous of, but not one that Bob uses consciously. “Did you guys try to take it off me before?” Tony’s voice is level, void of the hesitancy he actually feels, even to himself.
“Right away. It bonded with you as soon as you opened the package, and I tried to rip it off. You hit me with a repulsor blast.” Bob points to the gaping hole in the front of his costume.
“What happened to you, Tony?” Carol asks.
“I don’t know yet.” She looks unsatisfied, but it’s completely true. For once he’s not holding anything back. It’s not yet in any kind of order he understands. Bob was there, with him, and Carol too. He was alone with it, and they were with him all along. That thing, a piece of alien technology from the ship they fought and downed yesterday, is gone; incinerated in the sun. Tony can’t fault Bob’s logic, but now he’s got nothing to analyze except his apartment and the armor’s muddled readings.
He looks up at them, knowing his face can’t hold much of comfort for them. “I don’t know what that thing was, but it was dangerous.”
Carol arches an eyebrow, ‘obviously,’ plain on her face. Bob just looks grave, like he usually does.
A double beep announces a transmission coming through for Carol. “Black Widow to Ms. Marvel.”
Carol taps the better-than-Bluetooth Avengers com on her ear. “Go ahead Widow.”
“We’ve apprehended the delivery boy. He knows nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Ares made quite sure-” Natasha’s voice is obscured. Tony tries to boost the signal, but it’s something on her end. Something physically obstructing the com. He hears a muffled shout of “Ares!” and then Natasha’s back. “He’s most likely a dupe.”
“Bring him back to the tower, anyway. Reed and Tony will have some questions for him, before we turn him over to the cops.”
“Tony?”
“He’s fine.” Carol watches him while she speaks, knowing he hears both sides of the conversation.
“And the device?”
“Bob took care of it.”
“Excellent.” Her voice is softer, not directed to the mic. “Ares, we’re heading back to the tower.” Ares, barely audible in the background, sounds pleased. Tony wonders if he should start feeling sorry for the delivery boy now, or wait until he’s seen him. “On our way. Widow out.”
Carol turns to Bob, to relay her news but he waves her off. “I heard.”
“This is almost as bad as living at Xavier’s,” she says lightly. There’s a moment of awkward silence then. Bob, especially, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He crosses his arms across his chest; lets them fall to his sides; worries the tear in his costume.
Tony, meanwhile, checks the security cameras in the surrounding area, one after another. Simon’s still working the crowd; Jan the cops and firemen. He doesn’t envy them the duty. He doesn’t feel bad for them either-neither of them minds that kind of thing.
Bob starts then. “Lindy was shopping. I should go check on her,” he says, hesitating.
“After you change,” Tony says, nodding to the hole in his costume.
“I’ll be back soon, to help you and Reed.” He disappears.
It’s just him and Carol, and she waits for him patiently. ‘Only your life, Tony’.
“So?”
He rubs a hand back through his hair, probably messing it up more than it already is. “I need to get in touch with Blackbolt, T’Challa and Xavier.”
“After Reed’s given you a clean bill of health.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know, you would have made the worst airman.”
“Hey, hey.”
“You’d have set a new record for insubordination.”
He laughs tiredly. “Yeah, Probably.”
Only your life. He remembers everything clearly. Not-Carol, the dream, the sound and smell of it. Everything but the thing itself. His mind shies away from it. He got a look at it, at its real nature, but he can’t get at the memory of it. Just ocean salt and rotting seaweed. The cold. He hopes to god he never meets another derelict of whatever lost civilization produced it.
“You’re... you’re a good friend Carol.” She’s stunned, mouth gaping. They don’t talk like this. “And listen, I want to talk to you later.”
“Of course!”
“I... I want to talk about Cap.” Anger, pain. She runs the emotional gauntlet. He braces himself for getting hit again. He’s not the only one who cared about Cap. So far from it that Tony sometimes wonders if he has any place feeling his loss as much as he does; like he’s least of all entitled to miss him.
He swallows hard; swallows his bitterness, because this is something he needs. “Please,” he says, trying to put everything into that word. She has a right to be angry with him. They all do.
Finally, though, her face softens. “Alright.” She pats him on the knee. “I’m going to go check on Jan and Simon. You’re not going to pass out or get kidnapped by aliens if I leave you alone for a minute, are you?”
She’s torn between being worried for him, and wanting to get away from him. He decides to make it easy for her. “I’ll do my best.” She takes off, through the broken window, and then he’s alone. He should start putting together what evidence they have left; get things ready for Reed. But just now, sitting on the couch sounds like a great idea.
So he sits there, watching the sky turn orange and pink outside. The shards of glass embedded in the carpet catch it, and he’s treated to a hundred miniature rainbows spread out at his feet; but he only notes the beauty clinically. He sits there, for once not trying to banish the image of Steve’s coffin, sinking into the black.
He sits there, trying to remember what was in the deep.
THE END
Author: schmevil
Fandom: Mighty Avengers
Summary: Once upon a midnight dreary...
Character(s): Tony, Carol, Bob
Word count: 5,907
Warnings: Graphic violence, dead Steve
Notes: freakydarling was indispensable. Written for the cap_ironman Halloween challenge, for the prompt 'ghostly revenge'. The story is basically gen, though it's possible to read it as Steve/Tony and/or Carol/Tony.
Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. Systems are shot, the sensors are giving him gibberish, but he’s been falling-drifting, dead weight-falling for a while. Exact numbers. He tries to push them aside. Mac versus PC. Captain Crunch cereal. The word of the day is GENERATOR.
Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. The outer shell is compromised and he’s never worst case scenario-ed extremis for the Mariana Trench. At 35,810 feet, the pressure is 16,000 pounds per square inch; the water is less than a degree off of freezing. The water isn’t even water. It’s ooze. Will he even be able to see?
He got a pretty good handle on the damage before the armor went to basic. He can move inside the armor, a little. He’s got enough wiggle room to rub his toes, covered in the undersheath, across the inside of the armor. The dent is obvious, to him at least. Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. He can calculate to within a very small margin of error how long he has.
He smells his sweat, but that’s all. It’s gone sour after so long-one mississippi, two mississippi, thr-not quite dry against his skin. His reflection is gone from the face plate. There’s no light, nothing since the readouts stopped. No sound except his breathing. The ocean is so vast, and out here so under-populated, that he could fall for hours without making any new friends.
Until the armor starts to vent. Then he won’t be alone.
Mostly the ocean looks like nothing. Grey nothing. So he’s left with himself. Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. It’s cold. It shouldn’t be cold, not yet. Are the systems failing? His breathing-he has to conserve his air supply-is it elevated? Ignore it. Block it out, just-- Fifteen pounds. He took damage in the fight. It could be shock, and not the armor. Extremis tells him nothing. The connections are all dead, but he can’t stop worrying them, feeling them like a phantom limb. Is that blood? Per square inch, every thirty feet.
He’s nudged. He’s been falling so long it’s turning into sensory deprivation, and a couple of times he fooled himself; tricked himself into thinking there was something-no one is coming-but this is real, he thinks. Fifteen pounds. Fifteen. He’s nudged again. The faint tug of gravity shifts. Something pushing him from behind and below. He can’t see it, can’t see anything.
There’s a shadow, just beyond the faceplate. Hands, closing on him. He shouldn’t feel them, not through the armor, but they feel warm; pulling him up, too fast. But with no light, how is he seeing the outline of a man? Fifteen pounds per square inch, every thirty feet. Reverse that, see how the body copes. Is this real?
The face-the shadow of the man gets clearer, as his breathing gets harder-it’s not his, not his reflection, but he knows it. Lit somehow, like he has his own star. Blonde hair, whipped back from his face. Blue eyes, steady on his. It’s a little fuzzy, the name; as if just slightly out of his memory’s reach. “Tony,” Bob says. Two syllables, easy to read on his lips. Real, he decides.
“The pressure.”
Bob smiles at him, a little uneven. He hasn’t quite figured out reassuring yet. That’s why they keep him away from the civilians.
“The pressure! You have to slow down.” He shouldn’t say so much. There’s no way Bob can read his lips. But maybe he can hear him. Does his particular iteration of super-hearing work this deep? “Bob!” He just smiles. Keeps on smiling. Blue eyes, so clear, steady on his. So clear, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“The pressure, you have to stop!” The blue eyes; he sees them double now, his own laid over Bob’s. His reflection is back, courtesy of the glow Bob is generating. His own, pupils wide, and beneath them Bob’s, clearest blue with the tiniest pinprick of black, dark as a starless sky. Empty.
“Bob!” He tries to move his armored limbs. With the main systems down it’s useless-he only manages to knock up against the inside of the armor. It sends a jolt of pain down his spine and he’s reminded of every injury. He feels it again, the hot trickle of blood. It’s worth the pain, if Bob notices. If he gets it.
For a second, Tony thinks he doesn’t. Nothing in his eyes change. Nothing changes, except he’s not as warm, like someone opened a window, and his body heat is being leeched out into the night air.
He’s cold, really cold, finally feeling the deep. He hears... something. “Bob?” Not breathing, but like it. Steady. He’s so cold-water?
“Bob!” he screams. The hands go hot on his biceps-burning-the only part of him that feels anything, and then they close. The fingers close tight around the armor; tear through it like it’s gold lief and not steel-adamantium. The water-
“Wake up!”
Warm hands on his biceps, holding him gently. Blue eyes, warm in the light of his bedside lamp.
His lips open. Half of him, still asleep, thinks to scream. Instead he gasps for air, choking on it like he’s forgotten how.
“Easy,” Carol says.
He takes another breath. Holds it a second before breathing out, forcing his body to relax. He stops the shaking by willing it, but no way it’s before she notices. As soon as he can, he says, “Shit.”
“Sounded like a bad one,” she says, almost casually; as if she’s not in her boss’s bedroom, in the middle of the night, watching him recover from a nightmare. Of course she’s also his friend, one of the best.
“It...was nothing.” He looks down, to her hands, half concealed by an over-long USAF shirt. They immediately drop to her lap. The skin of her legs, hardly covered by her shorts, is raised in goosebumps. “I didn’t know you still got cold.”
“I don’t, usually. It’s probably psychosomatic.” Carol gets up from the bed, and turns from him to the window that runs the length of the room, ceiling to floor. It’s lead grey outside, and matte from the heavy cloud cover, but the city lends enough illumination for Tony to see the snow. Thick streaks of white.
“Anyway, I just came up to return your book.” She looks back, over her shoulder, to his bedside table. His battered copy of Ideas and Opinions sits precariously, ready to fall off the edge. She doesn’t say that she must have heard something, to come into his bedroom. His library/office is on the other end of the hall.
Tony pushes off the covers and sits up. He reaches over and pushes the book more solidly onto the table.
“Thanks,” he says, feeling he should say more. She looks away. She doesn’t hug herself, or put her hands on her hips- just stands there, plainly, exuding the confidence he wishes he could recall. It’s Carol though, and he knows what’s underneath that isn’t so cool. If there was anyone he could talk to-
He gets up and looks for his discarded socks. The floor is just cool enough to be uncomfortable.
“Hey, don’t let me keep you up.”
“No, I’m up now.”
“I was going to microwave myself some milk. Sounds cliché, but you want some?”
Tony rubs the sleep out of his eyes, trying to banish the dream with it. “Throw in a cookie and I’m sold.” He finds the socks hiding halfway under the bed, and pulls them on one-handed, using the other for balance, still sleep-stupid. “Listen, I’ll meet you in the kitchen. I just need the bathroom.”
He looks up in time to see the concern she doesn’t do a good job of hiding. “I’ll go fire up the microwave.”
He turns on the light before he even gets to the bathroom, and checks the security cameras with less than his full attention. Quick glance through the lower levels. The empty rooms on the Avengers’ level. Ignores the Watchtower. It’s easier not to test CLOC.
He hates to look at himself in the mirror, but this time he can’t help himself. Everything in its usual order. Tony turns on the tap and forces himself to look down at the water.
“Shit.” He takes a second to laugh at himself, then cups his hands to splash his face.
His apartment is dark, and he purposely takes his time in heading down to the kitchen. By the time he gets there, Carol’s got two mugs of steaming milk ready, and a plate of shortbread cookies, one of which she’s already munching on.
Tony props an elbow on the table and rests his chin in the palm of his hand. “I didn’t know we had shortbread,” he says around a yawn.
“Jarvis is probably hiding them from you.”
“That is completely unjustified.” He snags two biscuits and gets a raised eyebrow for his trouble.
“You ate the last package before anyone even knew they were in the house.”
“I was hungry. They were the first things I found.”
Carol rolls her eyes. “You could give a dietician a heart attack.” She settles back into a slouch, her legs wide, and her mug cradled in her hands.
There are no windows in the kitchen but past Carol, he sees the common room-what used to be the living room-and outside it’s still coming down hard. He’s got his back to the wall and he can see both the exits, but Carol sat down first. Maybe it’s a soldier’s way of calming down a friend who’s hysterical from a nightmare. A few minutes of awkward small talk-“these are good cookies” “aren’t they?” “look at it come down” -and they’re settling into an even more awkward silence.
“Listen,” she says. “You don’t have to say anything, and I don’t have to ask.” ‘But you’ve been doing this a lot lately’, is what goes unsaid. It’s not the first time she’s been there when he’s started out of a nightmare. It’s the first time she’s had to wake him, though.
Carol’s got more than enough fodder for nightmare’s herself, and back when they used to talk more, when they both went to regular meetings, she’d tell him about hers. Being caught in a firefight without a weapon. Hands, always hands.
“It’s just...” She waits patiently, even though she’s not patient by nature. She’s a good friend, he thinks.
Shop talk-he could do an end run around this whole thing by bringing up the meeting first thing Monday morning. All the SHIELD department heads and sub-directors. The budget. Just the kind of thing Carol, and he-admit it-hate. Or he could be straight with her.
“Drowning. Lately, it’s always drowning.” She keeps on waiting, face carefully neutral. He looks down to his milk. There are crumbs crusted around the edges of the mug. This should be easier.
“One time I had the same nightmare every night for a month,” she finally says. Making it easy on him. “It was after Afghanistan. After I was cleared for active duty.” He remembers Afghanistan. She crashed during a recon, in hostile territory, in his plane. His precious new prototype.
He remembers the sick irony of putting someone else behind enemy lines, in the hands of terrorists.
“I didn’t dream about the torture. Maybe my mind couldn’t deal and needed a break from it. Maybe I was really over it.” She pauses, for a long moment. Lost somewhere in her memory. “I used to dream about the cell. Like, what if it wasn’t just a couple of days? What if I never got out?”
Tony swallows hard, looks up-has to force himself to meet her gaze.
“A rat in a cage, with only other rats for company.” She stops there. Carol’s already seen his worst, and he’s seen hers. All he has to do now is talk about his dreams.
“I’m alone. Until-”
“Something comes?”
“Yeah.” He laughs at himself. “This time it was Bob.”
“Your nightmare is Bob?”
He leans in, grinning. “Shh, he might hear you.” The both laugh. Bob probably hears that, too. He doesn’t care, though; it’s like the tension melts out of him, and for a long while they just sit together. Polishing off the cookies. He has a sneaking suspicion they’re Jan’s. Not that she’d ever admit to shortbread binges.
He’s comfortable like this, just the two of them. He forgot this. So it surprises him when she brings it up again.
“So, why water? Why are you dreaming about drowning?”
“I don’t know,” he says, and he doesn’t really want to. “Listen, I don’t-” She cuts him off.
“Anything significant happen in your life lately, relating to water?”
He puts down his mug and half-eaten cookie. She laughs.
“I’m teasing you. I shouldn’t, I know. It’s cruel.”
“No, you shouldn’t.” And you wouldn’t, not about this.
“Rat in a cage. Tin soldier drowning in the deep. Is that all I am to you Tony? A reflection of some part of yourself?”
“Carol, what the hell?” A spike of adrenaline goes through him. Is he still dreaming? But no, the crack in the tiles in front of the fridge, cookie crumbs scattered around his chair-it’s too real. Too ordinarily ugly. There are other things this could be.
He still has access to the Avengers database. (He built that database, with Vision. He’s dreamt about it before, hasn’t he? So familiar). He needs to know what he’s facing.
“Who are you?”
“Oh Tony, is it so hard to believe that your cute blonde sidekick doesn’t want to play nice anymore? I’ve always had a nasty streak.”
Looks like Carol, sounds like Carol, but manifestly not her. Unless she’s possessed.
“That’s what I am, isn’t it? Tony 2.0? Or should I say 3.0-you’ve already remade yourself. On the sixth day, Stark created man.”
She waves a hand. The data streams go static, a few seconds of white noise, on a thousand different signals, straight to his brain. His vision almost goes with it. He shakes it off. Concentrates on the chair, the table, her body.
He has to force his voice even. “You’re obviously not Carol, so what the hell are you?”
“A little bit of you; a little bit of him.” No, he thinks. Whatever this is, it’s bullshitting him.
“Maria said I was your favorite blonde, but I’m not sure that’s right. Favorite living blonde maybe. You do seem to have a weakness for us.”
“Shut up,” he says, regretting the words before he’s even done forming them.
She laughs again. It’s nothing like Carol’s easy laugh, and she sees it, what it does to him. She just laughs harder. Her mouth-
He stands up, throwing his chair back into the wall. He can see every exit, but she’s between them and her. The armor. Not responding. Down with everything else.
She could be jamming the signal. Or none of this could be happening at all. He starts running down the list. Technological maybe. Or magic, he hates magic.
Not-Carol is still loose, still comfortable in her chair. Tony’s chair, in his kitchen. He designed it, knows everything in it, except how to use the appliances. He starts looking for a weapon. The digital readouts that grace nearly everything in his place flash 00:00 and then die. He eyes the frying pan, drying in the sink-there’s always blunt force trauma. But he needs to know if it’s in her body.
She smiles again. Puts down her mug and leans her elbows on her knees. The body language-it’s Carol’s.
“It was a sweet ceremony.” She pushes her chair back and gets up, and slowly starts moving toward him. If this is Carol, under some kind of control, if this thing has her powers, there’s nothing he can do without the armor. And it it’s not-It’s cut the signals. He doesn’t know what it is.
“Committing him to the sea. Better than that pathetic display at his funeral." Carol wasn’t there, with the founding Avengers, when they put him back into the ice. This thing, it knows things she doesn’t. Things that no one does.
And it wants him to know that.
“Did you know,” she lowers her voice. “That they were all laughing at you. Crying like a widow.” She giggles. Shit, like Cassie when she was younger. She doesn’t laugh like that anymore, but he remembers it.
“Oh sweetie, not another one. Don’t you think she’s a little young for you?”
He reaches over and grips the frying pan. She grins again, mouth wide, wider than it has any right to be, and inside-
“You don’t get to talk about her.”
Not-Carol charges, and she’s on him, fast like Carol is. He’s already swinging when that screaming mouth, (wide and black, like a starless sky), is before him. Salt, he smells salt. Something burnt. Before he can place it, she’s moving again, evading his attack easily. He’s too slow, even with extremis.
She screams again, and he can’t see, can’t look-
Her hands on his body, cold enough to burn; like his skin is turning to ice. He brings the pan up again, with everything he has, against the base of her skull. That shuts her up. She stumbles away from him, pained.
“Get out of her face.”
She looks up at him through bloody hair, stuck in pieces to her face. “Tony?” she asks softly. “What’s going on?”
It sounds just like her; like that time in Seattle, when she begged him for help.
“Tony.”
“Don’t make me tell you again.” He tests the weight of the skillet in his hands. Jarvis likes to make grilled cheese sandwiches in it; 12” of cast iron stopping power. She’s shut down the data streams, his armor-his options are getting thin.
She laughs again. He’s tired of hearing it. “If this is real, why don’t you call for help? Bob’s just upstairs.” If this is real, then he’s already heard and can’t get to him, or she’s blocking him. If this is real, then Carol will forgive him.
“Help, bitch.” She doesn’t like that.
She screams, and it’s like the white noise that’s still in his head; like his eardrums are shredding, and soon he feels it more than hears it. She opens her mouth wide, and the black of it, what’s in it-his mind tries to get away from it, he’s losing his grip, but he needs to know-is spreading. He can’t see past the black.
“I said, get out!” Did he speak? All he can hear is ringing, and his muscles, everything feels like ice. Doesn’t matter. She’ll hear him anyway.
Something. Something is coming. If it’s real, she’s superhuman, she’ll forgive him. Something-
Vision blazes back, and Carol’s there, in her flight suit, hair pulled back. A foot away from him with her hand extended, like the first time he ever saw her. Not real. Not real, he tells himself. At least not this. Closes the slight distance between them and brings the skillet down across her face.
She hits the floor with a wet thud, and doesn’t move.
Her blonde hair is a crown over her bloody face; a pool of spilt honey. The ratty sleep-shirt she’s had since the academy is ruined now. He takes a few cautious steps towards the body. It doesn’t move.
Tony feels for the armor. Nothing but white noise. It’s sharper this time, when he reaches for a connection. He pulls away from it. “Whatever you are, you’re not going to win this.”
“I already have,” says a dead man from behind him.
He doesn’t turn, doesn’t look away from the body. It’s-He’s behind him. Right behind him. Tony can feel the hot breath on his neck.
Tony wants nothing more than to close his eyes. He doesn’t. “How do you figure that?”
“You won the battle but you didn’t win the war.” The dead man sidles closer. Tony’s peripheral vision catches a mail-covered shoulder; white and red leather. The scent of the ocean. “How are you going to do that,” he whispers into Tony’s ear. “When you want to trade places with me? When you’d rather be here, down among the dead men?”
“You’re not him.”
“A little bit of you; a little bit of me.” Leather-covered fingers close around his wrist. “It doesn’t have to be hard.”
“What do you want?”
“Just your life.”
Tony tightens his grip on the pan. “You don’t even sound like him.”
“Let go, Tony.” Let go. Dead hands on him, only a few degrees off of freezing, but the breath is hot. Let go. The pain, he realizes, is gone. He feels nothing, and there’s no white noise.
“Seriously,” he says, like he’s shooting down a bad pitch. “Even Simon does a better Cap.” The fingers tighten, for just a moment, on his wrist. Tight enough that his knees almost buckle. He feels the skillet drop from his fingers. “Have you heard Simon’s Cap? It’s terrible. But yours is actually worse.”
Tony’s spun around until he’s facing the dead man, cold hands burning his shoulders again. The cowl’s pushed back so Tony can see the face, Steve’s face. Perfect except for the bullet holes in his neck, and pale skin; so pale it’s nearly blue, and shot through with bright veins. He doesn’t want to look, so he does. He stares. Whatever this is, it’s not Steve. His friend is dead. At the bottom of the ocean.
“You’re a few months late with this. I’ve already been haunted.”
The black of those eyes, it’s not empty, there’s- “nothing you can do to me.” Tony shakes off its grip and pulls away. The white noise comes crashing back. The pain almost blinds him. He lets it wash over him.
“Want to bet?” asks the monster in Steve’s skin. It grins. That black grin spreads across Steve’s face, the skin buckling, folding back as it grows.
“Double or nothing.” He turns and runs, almost trips over Carol’s body, on his way out of the kitchen. He makes his way by memory. Vision’s unreliable.
Behind him, too close behind him, he hears it. “You can’t outrun me, Tony.” All pretense of being Carol or Bob, or Steve is gone. The voice is like rocks grinding, deep underwater. Every syllable is too long; hits him like it’s trying to grind his bones with speech alone.
He hears it following him. Too close. It sounds wet; like-he tries to push the thought away-like it’s shedding skin. Steve’s skin. Tony knocks a side table down behind him. A dining room chair. “Where’re you gonna go?”
It’s gaining on him.
The pain, he thinks. He takes hold of it, pushes his body through it, even as it tries to shut down. Sensory overload is about two steps away, but so is the window. He keeps his body running and opens his mind to the white noise. Then he reaches.
“Tony!”
It almost sounds worried, he thinks, in the moment he has before his body hits the glass. Then he’s through, falling in a hail of light. No snow, no lead-grey sky-just sunlight, hot and bright. Behind him, it’s screaming; still screaming in his head.
He feels the empty shell of where the data streams and armor should be, past the noise. Where is it? He’s falling. Falling again. Fifteen pounds per square inch. The pressure. Slow down. Slow down. Your life, Tony. Only your life.
There.
The armor reforms around him, plating moving smoothly back into place. “There you are, baby.” He hits the jet boots, and rotates 180 degrees, repulsors already raised to hit that thing.
Only, there’s just a hole in Stark Tower, where the glass of the living room window was, and nothing coming for him. “Where...?”
“Tony!” He turns to see Carol flying beside him in full costume, palms open. Saying with her body, ‘easy, easy.’
Is this real? There’s nothing in her eyes but her. Please. It feels real, but so did Not-Carol, the cookies and milk. Glass is still falling from the window frame, a few last lingering pieces. If the glass is real, if he’s real, if any of this is, then some of that was real too.
The armor tells him he was in his bedroom, then the bathroom and the kitchen. Everything’s a jumble, the readings all mixed up; as if the heat sensors are trying to measure sound; aural sensors trying to analyze light. Before that, there’s a gap in recording, and before that there’s just the mission. Yesterday’s mission. He takes a chance.
“Carol?”
“Look at your chest.”
He does. A black thing, part flight recorder, part spider, is secured to the chestplate. Its feelers-tentacles? -are sunk right into the armor. “The hell?” He could blast it off with the unibeam, but that might take the rest of the armor, and him, with it. “Carol, can you-”
“Hang on!”
Then Bob, moving in a blur that the armor can almost track but his eyes can’t, is coming at him; bright like a star, and hands outstretched. Before Tony can fully register his presence, Bob’s reaching for the black thing, and pulling it off. For something less than a second, before he’s free of it, Tony can see into it. He falls.
Carol catches him before he can go very far. “Are you ok?”
“I...” She stares into the faceplate, like she can actually discern something from a blank metal facade. She can’t though. “I will be.”
“Well, good. Can you fly on your own?”
He tests his connection to the armor. He’s going to run about a thousand diagnostics and make a whole new chestplate, but everything else is reading normal. “I think so, yeah.”
“Then let’s go back up to the living room, until Bob’s back from throwing that thing into the sun.” They fly toward the window, Carol bringing up the rear. He doesn’t mind that she’s watching him.
“What’s up with him and the sun?” he asks weakly, as they fly through the window he apparently did smash through, moments ago. Once he lands, he dissolves the armor, and stumbles over to the couch. Carol crouches in front of him. There are bits of glass in her hair.
“Everyone has their thing. Can you get rid of the sheath?” He pulls it back into his body. It’s not the first time he’s sat on his couch naked, but usually that kind of thing happens under better circumstances. He laughs at that, at himself. Not even the nervous hitch that’s obvious in it seems to faze her.
“What’s yours?”
She pauses in her examination to look up, embarrassed. “...cars.” By this, and not by poking at his battered, naked body.
“You’ll have to tell me about that sometime.”
“Maybe after we get you checked out and make sure there are no more spider-boxes lying in wait.”
He looks around the battered suite; chairs knocked over and scorch marks on the floor. He’s set enough things on fire to know chemical burns when he sees them. “The glass-”
“Don’t worry. Jan and Simon are on crowd control. Natasha and Ares went after the delivery guy.”
“Delivery guy?” He pictures some poor Dominos driver, hunted down by the Black Widow and the God of War. It’s not pretty.
“You don’t remember?” Tony shakes his head, no. “I think you’ll make it until Reed shows up.” Carol rises out of her crouch and settles beside him on the couch, not too close. Tony covers himself with the sheath again, and checks on Reed-traces him to the Fantisticar, along with Sue, on their way here. He finds Simon and Jan through the building’s security cameras. Simon has the crowd in hand. He’s signing autographs and posing for pictures-whatever panic that another Avengers crisis might have sparked is gone. Jan’s handling the official response.
Natasha and Ares are harder to track. There aren’t enough CCTV cameras in the city to make it easy. He could start tapping satellites, but the lingering headache, like a technological hangover, makes it an unappealing prospect. He looks at Carol, sitting beside him, her red sash bunched unflatteringly at her waist, glass in her hair, and black smudges on her face. Watching him, and trying to look cool while doing it, but he can see the twist of concern at her mouth. Her eyes, framed by the domino mask, are worried; unsure.
“You have glass in your hair.”
“Oh damn.” she says, and shakes it out, artlessly graceful.
“So somebody sent me a spider... box… thing that wanted to eat my brain?”
“It wanted to eat your brain?” Tony starts. He didn’t hear Bob touch down. Bob looks a little worse for wear, hair mussed and costume torn, but well enough.
“That was the general impression I got.”
“Well,” he says, a little smug. “I don’t think it will have much success with that from inside the sun. Are you...?”
“Dr. Danvers says I’ll hold up until Reed gets here.” Bob’s glowing a little, literally. One of his comparatively minor powers that most people, even most heroes would be jealous of, but not one that Bob uses consciously. “Did you guys try to take it off me before?” Tony’s voice is level, void of the hesitancy he actually feels, even to himself.
“Right away. It bonded with you as soon as you opened the package, and I tried to rip it off. You hit me with a repulsor blast.” Bob points to the gaping hole in the front of his costume.
“What happened to you, Tony?” Carol asks.
“I don’t know yet.” She looks unsatisfied, but it’s completely true. For once he’s not holding anything back. It’s not yet in any kind of order he understands. Bob was there, with him, and Carol too. He was alone with it, and they were with him all along. That thing, a piece of alien technology from the ship they fought and downed yesterday, is gone; incinerated in the sun. Tony can’t fault Bob’s logic, but now he’s got nothing to analyze except his apartment and the armor’s muddled readings.
He looks up at them, knowing his face can’t hold much of comfort for them. “I don’t know what that thing was, but it was dangerous.”
Carol arches an eyebrow, ‘obviously,’ plain on her face. Bob just looks grave, like he usually does.
A double beep announces a transmission coming through for Carol. “Black Widow to Ms. Marvel.”
Carol taps the better-than-Bluetooth Avengers com on her ear. “Go ahead Widow.”
“We’ve apprehended the delivery boy. He knows nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Ares made quite sure-” Natasha’s voice is obscured. Tony tries to boost the signal, but it’s something on her end. Something physically obstructing the com. He hears a muffled shout of “Ares!” and then Natasha’s back. “He’s most likely a dupe.”
“Bring him back to the tower, anyway. Reed and Tony will have some questions for him, before we turn him over to the cops.”
“Tony?”
“He’s fine.” Carol watches him while she speaks, knowing he hears both sides of the conversation.
“And the device?”
“Bob took care of it.”
“Excellent.” Her voice is softer, not directed to the mic. “Ares, we’re heading back to the tower.” Ares, barely audible in the background, sounds pleased. Tony wonders if he should start feeling sorry for the delivery boy now, or wait until he’s seen him. “On our way. Widow out.”
Carol turns to Bob, to relay her news but he waves her off. “I heard.”
“This is almost as bad as living at Xavier’s,” she says lightly. There’s a moment of awkward silence then. Bob, especially, doesn’t know what to do with himself. He crosses his arms across his chest; lets them fall to his sides; worries the tear in his costume.
Tony, meanwhile, checks the security cameras in the surrounding area, one after another. Simon’s still working the crowd; Jan the cops and firemen. He doesn’t envy them the duty. He doesn’t feel bad for them either-neither of them minds that kind of thing.
Bob starts then. “Lindy was shopping. I should go check on her,” he says, hesitating.
“After you change,” Tony says, nodding to the hole in his costume.
“I’ll be back soon, to help you and Reed.” He disappears.
It’s just him and Carol, and she waits for him patiently. ‘Only your life, Tony’.
“So?”
He rubs a hand back through his hair, probably messing it up more than it already is. “I need to get in touch with Blackbolt, T’Challa and Xavier.”
“After Reed’s given you a clean bill of health.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You know, you would have made the worst airman.”
“Hey, hey.”
“You’d have set a new record for insubordination.”
He laughs tiredly. “Yeah, Probably.”
Only your life. He remembers everything clearly. Not-Carol, the dream, the sound and smell of it. Everything but the thing itself. His mind shies away from it. He got a look at it, at its real nature, but he can’t get at the memory of it. Just ocean salt and rotting seaweed. The cold. He hopes to god he never meets another derelict of whatever lost civilization produced it.
“You’re... you’re a good friend Carol.” She’s stunned, mouth gaping. They don’t talk like this. “And listen, I want to talk to you later.”
“Of course!”
“I... I want to talk about Cap.” Anger, pain. She runs the emotional gauntlet. He braces himself for getting hit again. He’s not the only one who cared about Cap. So far from it that Tony sometimes wonders if he has any place feeling his loss as much as he does; like he’s least of all entitled to miss him.
He swallows hard; swallows his bitterness, because this is something he needs. “Please,” he says, trying to put everything into that word. She has a right to be angry with him. They all do.
Finally, though, her face softens. “Alright.” She pats him on the knee. “I’m going to go check on Jan and Simon. You’re not going to pass out or get kidnapped by aliens if I leave you alone for a minute, are you?”
She’s torn between being worried for him, and wanting to get away from him. He decides to make it easy for her. “I’ll do my best.” She takes off, through the broken window, and then he’s alone. He should start putting together what evidence they have left; get things ready for Reed. But just now, sitting on the couch sounds like a great idea.
So he sits there, watching the sky turn orange and pink outside. The shards of glass embedded in the carpet catch it, and he’s treated to a hundred miniature rainbows spread out at his feet; but he only notes the beauty clinically. He sits there, for once not trying to banish the image of Steve’s coffin, sinking into the black.
He sits there, trying to remember what was in the deep.
THE END