s (atrophy) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-08-11 14:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, steve rogers |
narrative, Stark Tower: Steve R
Who: Steve Rogers
What: narrative
Where: Stark Tower
When: late last night
Warnings/Rating: some feels and 2nd person.
You push on the yoke. Your heart is in your throat. You choke on the muscle. But, you feel so warm. It's not a pleasant embrace. It's burns. Hot around the collar. Like a plume of fire is eating at the dry brush cortisol and marrow of your spine. Your hands and fingers are numb and white, but that heated acid licks up from the slosh of your stomach, up spongy trachea, and is flat as a toad on the back of your tongue. Cold shatters through the whistling break of glass and the sweat coming down your forehead in fingers feels like ice. Oh God. Everything is so fast. It's hurtling up at you, the world you came from, screaming in a dull roar against the pressurized drums of your ears. There's a voice, hard to hear, but a beacon. "I'll show you how. Just be there." You could cry. But you don't. The heavy, heavy stone in your gut keeps you pinned. "We'll have the band play something slow," you hear yourself say. Oh God. It's so close now. You are so scared. You don't shake, there is no tremor, no contraction—but you are so, so scared. There are seconds, seconds broken into fractions like bones on a blister of ice. You want to close your eyes. But again, you don't. The heavy, heavy stone in your gut keeps you pinned. Oh God. You make yourself smile. You finish the thought, because the voice—she needs it as much as you do. So you reach out over the static. Oh God, oh god. "I'd hate to step on your—" Steve didn't know how he'd gotten to the spill of black tarmac behind the trailer. He didn't know how he came to have so much blood on everything. On his knees. Scraped clean with the skin of his palms. His bottom lip throbbing and tender with bruised copper. He was gasping, hard, his white shirt soaked through to nothing. He didn't remember the sky looking like a minefield of light, bloody red streaks rising from the flat tops of buildings like skin torn from bone. But there were agents, standing around in their skins of black, and the telltale frowns, a tense harsh line of lips,—they told the man enough. He lurched to his feet. Bare feet slid on loose, broken asphalt. It felt like teeth. The invisible bug in his ear, that fishing line bit of contact was missing, but he didn't notice. Not until he had made it all the way back to Stark Tower with his suit over his shoulder and his shield raised. Steve closed his eyes to the rank stench of rot, of what he knew to be the putrefaction of viscera left in the sun, the smolder-black of wreckage lost. He ignored the cold, cold plunge he didn't even remember happening. He recited to himself, an old anchor: "Not all of us can storm a beach or drive a tank. But there's still a way all of us can fight." He ran. "H Series E Defense Bonds." He stripped himself of shirt, pants. The floor underfoot was smeared with red. His head pounded, his skull busted into fragments beneath it. Steve felt water sting his skin, neither hot nor cold. He choked on the muscle—no. He choked. "Each one you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guy's gun." Decontaminated, infected, he followed Gwen's instructions to find the vial in the cabinet. The rapid locomotion of his thoughts moved through Sharon, through Preston and Saint, Gwen, Pepper, Selina. On the blanched white of a bench, he stuck himself with the needle. You push down on the yoke. You inject the drug. Only this time there's no voice out there to meet yours. Your last thought is of how you should have sat back farther, because you feel yourself being taken by gravity—again. You crash to the floor with the needle still in your arm. |