ᛏᛟᚾᛁ ᛋᛏᚨᚱᚲ (iron) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-07-15 14:11:00 |
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“Guys, I got Strucker” “Yeah, I got -- something bigger.” A famous man once said that, ‘in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers’.And at this moment, staring at Loki’s sceptre, Stark was positive he understood what that statement meant. The algorithms that he and Bruce had locked in on informed the team that this time they wouldn’t be coming up empty-handed. The sceptre was here. But after all the searching, all the work and all the bitterness, there was nothing gratifying about reaching out to pluck the sceptre from where it stood. This wasn’t a victory. In fact, there was very little in Tony’s career, post-Iron Monger that Stark would have considered a victory. All he did, all he felt like he continued to do, was correct mistakes. His own, sometimes, like with Obadiah Stane and Aldrich Killian; Evetta Gorani and Maya Hansen -- or other people’s, like the nuke the WSC dropped on New York, or this the alien sceptre that they’d casually let fall into HYDRA’s hands without a second thought. There was nothing glorious about fixing a fuck up, and there was nothing to be proud of in almost getting the team killed in Georgia because of that mistake. It wasn’t even that he was underwhelmed, or not as relieved as he expected to be. He was glad that the sceptre meant they could go home and get back to work, but finding it did little to ease the anxiety that had already set into the back of his mind. More and more, the Avengers were facing things that they couldn’t fight, or hope to win against. The Celestials hadn’t been a force that they’d stopped, it had been luck that had stopped the annihilation of the world and no one was talking about it, or talking about what might happen if the Celestials came back -- and HYDRA, cloning Red Skull and masking together their own Avengers team with unleaded super serums and low-rent iron suits proved that they were getting better and that they had people on their side who were innovative, smart and who were willing to do whatever it took to watch the world burn. Bucky Barnes, Stark supposed, the Winter Soldier, was probably a better example of that than anything else they’ve done so far. Not just because of the precision and expertise of the Winter Soldier himself, but because he was such a perversion of everything that Captain America stood for; and thus everything that HYDRA stood against. It was sickly fascinating that HYDRA would use Barnes, who they undoubtedly recognised as Steve’s greatest ally during the war, and turn him into an enemy. It was bitterly poetic, to the point where Stark almost refused to believe it wasn’t intentional. Maybe he was just paranoid. His life had been a mess of conspiracy theories since his parents died. Therapists had told him he was just trying to rationalise what had happened; to find reason in a random accident. Order in chaos -- but he was right in the end, wasn’t he? And maybe he was right about other things too. Maybe since the very beginning, agents in HYDRA had worked against Howard and Peggy’s efforts. Maybe HYDRA knew, and had always known where Steve’s body had lay in the ice, and he’d only been “found’ when an alien threat as large as Loki and his Chitauri army loomed in the distance. The same Chitauri whose bodies and armour littered this room. There was something unsettling about seeing one of the gargantuan Chitauri Leviathan messes of armour and teeth strapped to the ceiling. It really made him reconsider keeping a Titan locked up on the grounds of Stark Expo: what the hell was he going to do with it if it died? “Thor.” Tony adjusted his ear piece. “I got eyes on the prize.” But something else grabbed his attention for just a moment. A heap of metal and wires, with glowing blue eyes lay in pieces on a table to his left. It looked like a robot, or some attempt to mimic the Iron Man armor -- perhaps some failed Iron Cross revamp -- whatever it was, it was something new, and something a lot more interesting to Tony than Loki’s sceptre. If HYDRA was making clones, and conducting human experiments, what kinds of morally ambiguous technology were they coming up with? Surely, it was worth investigating from a professional standpoint -- and perhaps one of morbid curiousity. But first the sceptre, in all it’s glory. He was so lost in his own thoughts, that he didn’t hear the creeping footsteps of someone else entering the room, didn’t feel the prickling sensation like he wasn’t alone, and didn’t notice anything strange (read: stranger than the corner of hell he already found himself in) happening around him. Until a guttural growl behind him sent ice water shooting up his spine. He spun around to see the Leviathan’s jaw crack to life, and watch as the monster swayed itself free of it’s tethers and swoop over his head, dripping rot and stench in it’s wake. When he spun around to follow the monster as it soared overhead, he noticed the entire landscape had shifted. Now, in front of him wasn’t a room full of battered electronics and stolen alien artifacts, but a staggered dark cliff, the final resting place of -- This couldn’t be real. It was Bruce he noticed first -- the Hulk -- slumped on his side and struggling, the muscles across his shoulders locked in spasm and the colour of his skin fading not back to pink, but to a colourless grey. Propped across his hip was a slender white arm, streaked with dark rivers of drying blood. As Stark took a step closer, deeper into this strange impossible place, he saw the person that arm belonged to, and a rise of strawberry blonde hair, matted to Pepper’s hollow cheeks as she lay, huddled as if being sheltered, by the broken failing body of the Hulk. Tony nearly slipped on the crumbling rocks, trying to crawl up to where Pepper lay when another body caught his eye. Iron Patriot, his chest plate torn half open and the reactor in his chest flickering out and sparking, a black substance that in the failing light could have been either blood or oil, pouring from the open mouth slot of his armour. Rhodes, in the costume, was completely still; completely unresponsive. Taking a half step back, away from Rhodey, he once again started to try and get up to where Pepper and Bruce were, when he noticed something else. Three feet to his left, jagged and shattered into pieces, lay Captain America’s shield. Beside it, sitting upright but quiet as Death itself, was his father, a piece of the shield dragged protectively into his lap. His arms looked broken, they hung at awkward angles, and the clothes he was wearing, the splatters of blood across his cheek and the rips in his shirt, they were all familiar. Even though the man that wore them now was younger, a bit leaner than he would be by the time his car was run off the freeway, Tony recognised the grotesque similarities immediately. “Tony -- ” The bottom nearly fell out of his stomach when he heard someone say his name. Stark was so caught up, so head-poundingly broken by the sight of his father, unpeacefully departed that he’d lost all sense of his own self. He hadn’t noticed his throat close or his pulse increase. He hadn’t even realised that he’d seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. He choked on the air and looked down to find the source of the voice, and there -- there so close it was a wonder he hadn’t stepped on him -- was Steve. Rogers was alive, if barely, and so soaked in his own blood that the dazzling blue of his suit and turned a dark muted violet. Tony dropped to his knees beside the fallen Avenger, pressing his hand against Steve’s chest and then raising it to throat, trying to get a read on the strength of his pulse. When he found that it was almost too faint to feel, he leaned in closer still. Suddenly, Steve’s hand shot up, he grabbed Tony by the wrist and jerked him forward. Steve lifted his head from the rubble, his bruised and bloated face turning towards Stark. “You c-could have s-saved us.” There was nothing pleading or forlorn about Cap’s words, he wasn’t sad -- he was angry. Bitter. All the faith, all the belief that he had put behind Stark’s words, his actions and his goals had lead him here and they both knew it. This was Tony’s fault, and as the grip Rogers had on his arm loosened and Steve fell back into unconsciousness, there was no doubt in Tony’s mind that they both knew it. This was it, this was how it ended. The path they were on was a grave mistake and he had brought them here, all of them. The Avengers trusted him, Steve had trusted him, and he’d ruined everything. They’d fallen victim to something too big, something they weren’t capable of stopping and he’d let it happen. Tony’s fingers, stained crimson with the blood soaked into Steve’s costume, he pressed into the white unsullied star in the centre of the Captain’s chest. Nothing was worse than this moment, and there was no one who deserved this less than Steve. Whatever had happened, whatever world they were trying to save or crisis they were trying to stop. Whatever they had tried to do and failed at -- it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth this. The piece of Captain America’s shield that was cradled in Howard’s crumpled arms dropped to the gravel and skidded to Tony’s knees. He looked at it for a moment, but then raised his gaze to see his father’s head lop over to one side and his dark, blood-rimmed mouth gap open. He spoke. “Why didn’t you do more?” The sky behind Howard’s head burst open, and the Leviathan who’d hovered overhead swam towards a sea of dozens of others through a bright, burning wormhole. He could hear the screeches of far of Chitauri, and the rumble of engines -- of weapons. And then nothing. A blink of his eyes and it was all gone. He was back where he started; a dead war beast swinging overhead and Loki’s sceptre glowing gently in front of him. He raised an arm, summoning an Iron Man gauntlet, reached forward, and grabbed the stupid thing. |