It was dark and cold. Ash fell like dirty snow in the beam of the small flashlight as Tony and Clint slipped and slid and stumbled down the mountain.
Tony's breath came in wheezing huffs. Fuck my life, his brain ranted as he skidded down the overgrown ravine after Clint, grabbing for protruding roots and rocks, anything that could add a measure of control to his decent. Fuck my life. Fuck. My. Life. His mind had been stuck on the same track for the past twenty minutes, but he was willing to cut himself some slack, because not only was he running for his goddamn life; no, no, he was running for his life from a volcano that decided today was a good day to throw a temper tantrum. A volcano that hadn't even existed when they arrived early that morning, and that was growing bigger and bigger with every passing minute.
"I had nightmares about this as a kid," he panted. "Know what they told me? They told me 'don't worry, Tony, that innocent little knoll down the road, thousands of miles from the nearest tectonic seam or local hotspot isn't going to turn into a volcano overnight and kill you and your family, volcanoes don't work like that." His voice broke and he started coughing on the smell of sulfur and fire in the air. "Liars," he wheezed. "Liars, all of them." He dared throw a glance over his shoulder, up the slope that was growing steeper and steeper by the minute as the volcano pulled the ground up with it. "Barton, are you sure you know where we're going?"
"Pretty sure, yeah." Even Clint sounded out of breath, and that made Tony feel a little better about his own state of exhaustion.
"You're pretty sure? That's not what I want to hear in a situation like this!" A particularly loud explosion echoed through the darkening forest behind them and Tony ducked his head as the trees around them shuddered.
"Jesus, Stark, just move," Clint growled.
"You have no idea where we are or where we're going, do you?"
Clint slid to a graceless stop in front of him, and Tony, accompanied by an avalanche of small rocks and loose gravel, had too much momentum to stop. He swore and grabbed at Clint to stop his descent, and for a precarious moment his arms wind-milled as he tried to keep them both from going head first down the slope. At the very last moment, his fingers wrapped around a tree branch, and he held on for dear life. "Sorry," he offered hoarsely as he righted himself. "But seriously, are we even going in the right direction?"
"Yes, we're going in the right direction," Clint snapped. "Stop asking."
"It's a perfectly valid concern! Seeing as you were the one who got us lost in the first place."
Clint wiped the sleeve of his jacket over his face. His eyes were red, irritated by the ash that stuck to his skin, his hair, his clothes. "Okay, one, we weren't lost, and two, as far as I'm concerned the only right direction here is away from that." He pointed towards the volcano that raged in the darkness behind them, and Tony grudgingly had to agree that he had a point.
They'd taken out the struggling ex-Hydra research cell without much trouble. A few well-aimed blasts from Tony's repulsors had taken care of the power supply and shortly thereafter the guards and the staff in the labs had reconsidered their life choices and surrendered. After it was over, Rogers and Natasha had worked with the local law enforcement to coordinate the transport of the surviving staff from large compound while Tony and Clint had been rounding up a few runners who were trying to vanish into the dense forest that came right up to the walls of the run down facility.
With as well as everything had been going, Tony probably should have known something was bound to happen, but hindsight is 20/20, and all that. Friday had been in the middle of a report of unusual fluctuations in the geomagnetic field when she started to cut out. Several of Tony's primary and secondary and tertiary systems started flickering. He had tried to run diagnostics routines, but they too failed. When the repulsors had started cutting out too, Tony had decided to take it to the ground, because gravity coddles no one, not even Tony Stark.
It hadn't been a pleasant landing, and as he had bounced and skipped without control along the rocky ground he had taken a few seconds to be grateful about the many hours he had put into the mechanical integrity of his suit. He had joined up with Clint and spent an hour tracking the last two runners, and never mind what Clint claimed, he had gotten them lost. They had been arguing over which way the compound was when a massive, echoing 'crack' had torn through the mid-day landscape and the ground bad bucked. Tony clearly remembered thinking two things as he was flung off his feet.
The first was: This must be what it's like to ride a live rodeo bull.
The second (and the last for a while) was: That tree looks pretty damn hard.
He had no idea how long he had been out, just that he had woken flat on his back on the frozen ground with a headache from hell and a baby-sized volcano next door. He'd still been trying to get his bearings when Clint had appeared above him, grabbed the front of his jacket and dragged him upright. Tony had gotten with the program pretty damn fast, because the running from the erupting volcano seemed like the thing to do. His brain was still trying to wrap itself around the fact that the thing had just appeared. Insta-volcanoes? How was this his life?
Clint shoved the small flashlight at him, and Tony angled it up at the trees crowns that towered overhead. He coughed drily into the sleeve of his jacket. Only a thin strip of dirty, washed out daylight could still be sensed ahead of them now, and even that was slowly fading. He knew what that meant. The ash cloud was overtaking them for real and the last of the remaining light would soon fade.
Clint removed the ear bud from his ear and pulled the zipper of his jacket down. The shirt underneath was startlingly black against the gray ash that was coating all of him. He rubbed the ear bud against the shirt, then blew at it before putting it back in.
"Rogers? Do you read?" Pause. "Romanoff?"
They hadn't had any contact with any of the others since Tony fell out of the sky and the eruption started. They'd all flown in on the jet, but with the way Friday had been knocked out, he wasn't optimistic about the state of it, so the Natasha and Rogers were probably on the ground somewhere. Running, like them.
Clint shook his head. "Just static."
"We're still too close." Tony wiped the back of his hand over his face. "Whatever deep-fried my suit probably took out that one, too. And even if didn't, the ash ionizes the air. This close to the eruption, you might as well be speaking into a tin cup with a string attached to it." As if to support Tony's claim, another silent bolt of lightning lit up the darkness above from within.
Tony was just about to suggest they keep moving when the tree next to them disintegrated with a massive crash, splintering into a barrage of severed branches, leaves and pieces of wood. Tony was flattened to the ground, arms instinctively going over his head. He caught a glimpse of Clint's flashlight as it tumbled and spun crazily in the monochromatic twilight, bouncing down the ravine they'd been following. One last tumble, and it went dark.
Pumice and ash fell through the trees crowns above them, the whispering sound riding the deeper rumble of the volcano. When it seemed no other surprise was forthcoming, Tony dared lower his arms and push up on his elbows. "How about a 'fore' next time, you tectonic piece of crap!" he screamed hoarsely at the sky.
"Ow," Clint groaned next to him.
Tony spat dirt from his mouth. "Is that an 'ow, I skinned my knee', or an 'ow, I've been impaled by something sharp and horrible and I'm bleeding out'?"
"Something in between, I think," Clint mumbled. "What the hell was that?"
A cascade of dirt and ash fell from Tony as he pushed up on his aching knees. "It's a volcano, Barton. It throws things into the air. And the laws of nature dictate that everything that goes up must eventually—"
From one moment to the next, the continuous trembling of the ground stopped, and an intense stillness fell over the darkened mountainside.
"…come down."
Please, please, please, Tony thought, please let it be over. Three massive explosions echoed through the forest in rapid succession. The ground shuddered beneath them. Boom. Boom. Boom. The rumbling started up again.
No, of course not.
Clint made it to his feet with a groan. "You okay?" he asked. He reached down and helped Tony up.
"I'm stuck in the middle of a volcanic eruption and rocks the size of refrigerators are being flung at my head, but thanks for asking. How are you?"
Clint grabbed Tony's chin and turned his head to the right. "You're bleeding."
Tony touched his cheek and his fingertips came away wet. Yep. Bleeding.
"Doesn't look too bad, though," Clint said.
He started to turn, and even before it played out, Tony saw what was coming. The rock under Clint's boot shifted in the loose soil and his ankle rolled sickly. Tony's hand snaked out, made a grab for his jacket, but it was too late. With a cry, Clint toppled over and went down the ravine head first, tumbling wildly before coming to a brutal-looking stop some twenty feet below.
"Shit." Tony skidded down after him, just barely managing to stay on his feet. He crouched next to Clint and tried very hard to banish the memories of that stupid kid at boarding school who had jumped from the roof of the janitor shed. Tony didn't remember much, just that there had been blood and screaming and jagged white bone sticking out where it shouldn't be sticking out.
Clint had curled up on his side with his hands wrapped around his ankle. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, ow," he groaned past clenched teeth.
"Jesus. You okay? Let me see."
"Wait, wait." Clint's voice was strained. "Just... wait." He breathed deeply a couple of times, then uncurled slowly. Tony watched his face twitch as he gingerly moved his foot first a fraction to the right, then to the left. "I don't think it's broken," he said. The wince that escaped him when he apparently moved a little too much told Tony that broken or not, that ankle was hurting a lot.
"Let's rest a few. We should be pretty safe here for a while, right?"
"We're really not."
"We're miles from the peak, Barton." Tony climbed down a few precarious feet. The twilight made it hard to see any details, but he eventually found Clint's dark flashlight in the undergrowth.
"Wanna know a fun fact about Mount St. Helens?"
Tony pressed the button on and off and on again, but the flashlight remained stubbornly dark. He shook it, and the rattle of small loose pieces inside told him it was a lost cause. He dropped it with a sigh and climbed back up. "What about it?"
"Nothing within twenty-two miles of the north side survived that eruption."
Tony froze, then squeezed his eyes shut. "Aw, man. I so didn't need to know that." He opened his eyes as a series of hard booms echoed through the forest. "Seriously? Twenty-two miles?"
"Yep. The initial blast stripped the mountain right down to bedrock the first eight miles, shredded the forest flush to the ground for the next eleven miles. The pyroclastic flows that followed burned everything within another three miles to a crisp."
"Good times all around," Tony mumbled. "Okay, so we're not safe. Just let me just take a look at that and then we'll get going again." He reached for the crusted, muddy laces of Clint's boot, but Clint's fingers clamped down on his wrist.
"No. Leave it."
"Listen, I know you're fond of the whole stoic thing, but we need to do something about that foot."
"Like what?"
Tony threw his hands up. "I don't know. Like look at it, like make sure it isn't broken-."
"It's not broken."
"-wrap it, stabilize it, chant over it, something."
"Good ideas, all of them. I particularly like the chanting." Clint got to his knees with a groan, then pulled himself the rest of the way up with the help of a low-hanging branch. "How about a sample?"
Tony glared at him.
"Lighten up, Stark."
"I'm sorry if I'm bringing you down, but my sense of humor decided to emigrate somewhere safer right around the time a mountain materialized only to explode next to me." He scowled over his shoulder. "I'm starting to suspect that the genetic lab thing might have been a front."
"Ya think?" Clint gave his boot and the injured foot inside a baleful glare. He took a small, experimental step, but his ankle must have protested very loudly, because Tony had to grab him to keep him from going down again.
"So I'm thinking maybe we should take a look at it anyway, huh?"
Clint shook his head, eyes screwed shut. "Take that boot off and it's not going back on again. The swelling will see to that." He blew a strained breath past his teeth. "It's just a bad sprain. I hope. Either way, a few hours more or less isn't going to make a difference here, and keeping the boot laced up will help stabilize the joint."
Tony scowled. "You know, I hate it when you make sense." He stepped in and allowed Clint to drape his arm across his shoulders for support. "So, what's up with the volcano trivia, Rainman?"
"Lo siento, Stark, that information is classified."
"Classified?" They started down the slope and Tony's feet slipped on newly disturbed gravel, and the two of them almost went down again.
"It's a big word, I know, it means confidential, top-secr—"
"Shut up. Are you telling me SHIELD was involved in the Mount St. Helens eruption?"
"Well, you know what they say…"
"In this matter? No, I most certainly don't."
"They say: SHIELD can neither confirm nor deny involvement in this matter."
Tony groaned. "Oh, come on. Dangling something like that in front of me and then just clamming up is not cool, Barton. So not cool. That eruption was massive, it was more than massive, probably on the scale of a few megatons—"
"Twenty-six."
"What?" He grunted as he boosted Clint up and over a massive long-ago fallen tree that blocked their path.
Clint lowered himself down on the other side and helped Tony up. "Twenty-six megatons."
Tony got his knees under himself and stared down at him. "You're shitting me."
"Let's go, Stark."
"No, no, no, you've gotta give me something, here." He slid down after Clint. "What was it? Some alien geothermal power device that went ka-bloowie? A beta version of the tesserract? What was it? What, what, what?"
Clint just pointed down the darkness of the slope.
"Fine," Tony huffed. "Be that way."
Without the flashlight and with Clint hanging on to him, the pace they managed to set was much too slow for Tony's liking now that the idea of being incinerated by an avalanche of superheated volcanic debris had taken root in his head. Burning to death was not how he wanted to go, so he was all in favor of moving, but breathing was getting increasingly unpleasant, his lungs ached and itched like he had inhaled a bottle of chalk.
"Hang on a sec," he said hoarsely and made sure Clint had his balance before letting go. He unzipped his soft-shell jacket and shrugged out of it. The freezing air seeped through the sweaty layers underneath within seconds.
"Uh, Tony?"
"What?"
"Whatcha doin'?"
He dumped the jacket in Clint's arms and pulled the long-sleeved shirt off. "Something I should have done long ago." The t-shirt went next. It was damp and clung to his skin as he pulled it over his head. An involuntary shiver ran through him.
Clint raised one gray eyebrow. "Why, Stark. If I'd known you'd be giving me a floor show, I would've brought one-dollar bills."
"You wish." He snagged the long-sleeved shirt from Clint's hands and pulled it back on, grateful for the thin layer of protection from the cold. The jacket went back on, too, and he zipped it up all the way. "I'm trying to prevent lasting damage to our lungs. Do you have any idea what's in this crap?" Tony motioned at the ash that kept falling around them.
Clint glanced up at the sky. He ended up making a couple of weird little one-footed skips to keep his balance on the uneven ground. Tony reached out and steadied him. "I'll go out on a limb and say ash."
"As always, Barton, your powers of observation astound me. This is pretty much pulverized volcanic glass. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there might be sulfur and chloride ionic compounds in it. The very things that turn into sulfuric and hydrochloric acid on contact with moisture. Which you incidentally have in your lungs."
Clint's eyebrows knitted a little. "That doesn't sound great."
"No shit." Tony held out his hand. "Give me your knife."
Clint handed it over and Tony kneeled on the ground. He turned the shirt over a couple of times in his hands, trying to figure out the best way to go about it, then simply sliced through the fabric at the side seams. The blade of Clint's knife met hardly a whisper of resistance. Not that he had expected anything less from Clint, but this was one seriously sharp knife. He handed the knife back by the tip, then tossed one half of the shirt to Clint. "Not exactly an N95 mask, but it's better than nothing."
Clint tied the butchered shirt over his face. "Remind me to give you one of my deodorant sticks when we get back, Stark."
"Well, excuse me, but turns out I've spent quite some time running from a fucking volcano," Tony snapped.
"You could have used your other shirt, you know."
"Listen, with your sense of direction we might be spending god knows how long out here, and it's already freezing, so really, Sensitive Sally, choosing between sparing your delicate senses and cutting up my warm, nice, long-sleeved shirt wasn't all that difficult."
"Again with the direction!" Clint flung out his arm at mountain behind them. "There's a big-ass landmark right there, so it's not like we don't know which way we came from!" He started saying something else, but his voice broke on a cough, and he doubled over. Tony stepped in and curled his fingers around the back of Clint's belt, making sure he didn't go head over heels.
"Seriously, Barton. You need to breathe." Tony hiked him up a little. "How the hell are you going to get me back safely if you don't breathe?"
"Keep bitching and I'll leave you here," Clint managed before another coughing fit hit.
Tony started to answer, but the itching in his own lungs had reached a point where it couldn't be ignored any longer, and he gave a small cough. And that was apparently all the go-ahead his lungs needed, because next thing Tony knew, they were trying to turn themselves inside out. Once he started coughing, he couldn't stop. He clutched blindly at a nearby tree and tried to lower Clint down to the ground as gently as he could.
When Tony could finally take a breath without going into more paroxysms he was on his hands and knees, fingers splayed wide on the stony ground. A memory of another time on all four with pine needles stinging his hands flashed through his mind. Out of the blue, his father had decided that twelve year-old Tony needed to spend time with his extended family, and Tony had been deposited with three of his cousins. Sixteen, fourteen and fourteen. Parental supervision was as unknown of a concept there as it was in the Stark household, and the cousins from hell had announced that they were taking Tony camping overnight in the private woods that surrounded the house. It'll be fun, they said. We'll take good care of him, they said.
What they did was smuggle a bottle of something disgusting along, and before they were even out of view from the main house they had started in on it. Over the next hours they had goaded Tony to down a large part of it on his own. A sizable chunk of time was still missing in his head from that night. What he did remember was being left behind, on his hands and knees, with booze and bile splattering over the ground beneath him.
Tony cleared his aching throat and scooted up against the closest tree, leaning heavily against it. "I hate volcanoes," he mumbled. He sat there and tried hard to keep from starting to cough again when he suddenly realized the noise he'd been listening to had changed. He turned his head, tried to pinpoint to source of this new sound. He could tell the moment Clint noticed it too.
Tony looked up the dark slope behind them. "What is that?"
The sound was growing louder.
Clint didn't move for a moment, face turned towards the sound, then he twisted and grabbed Tony's arm. "Run," he said. "You have to run."
The noise was still growing and Tony suddenly knew what it was. "Oh, shit." He grabbed Clint's jacket and pulled him up, but Clint shoved him away.
"I'll slow you down. Go!"
"Not gonna happen," Tony ground out and yanked him close again. If he was right in his assumption that the sound was a pyroclastic flow roaring down the mountain side from the summit, then sure as hell wasn't going to leave his teammate behind. "Oh, man, this is bad," he panted under his breath as they began stumbling down the mountain again. The sound, still growing, was changing into something hard and huge and ferocious. "This is so fucking bad."
"There! Up there!" Clint's voice was almost lost in the roar now, but he was pointing at the small ridge that ran parallel to them.
Tony suddenly realized they were between two such formations, in the middle of a natural chute, perfectly aligned to guide a volcanic avalanche of superheated gas and rock and fire down the mountain. Fuck. They had to get out of there. Using everything at their disposal, branches, protruding roots, rocks, trees, they scrambled up the rocky incline, and Tony tried not to think about all the things he knew about pyroclastic flows, about how fast they could move, about how the heat was so massive it incinerated a body in seconds, flash cooked your brain so fast the skull cracked from the inside as the fluids boiled and evaporated.
They had barely made it to the top of the ridge when the nightmare surged from the darkness with a ground-shaking howl. Clint stumbled heavily against him as the first rush of violent air reached them. For a split second, Tony saw reedy trees and bushes bending impossibly before the last of the dim light around them vanished like someone hit a switch. He threw his arms over his head, trying to protect it against the sand and small rocks that whipped past him. The sound was nothing more than a terrible, painful crackling pressure now, too loud for the brain to process properly.
Then the shockwave hit. Clint slammed into Tony and they went down in a painful heap of elbows and knees and ragged stones. Simple survival instinct screamed at Tony to move, to claw his way to his feet and get to safety, and he managed to push up on all four. Clint was a heavy, half-draped weight over him, and Tony shoved at him, yelled at him to get off, get up, to fucking move, because he didn't want to die like this, not like this. He felt Clint grab the front of his jacket and before Tony could react, Clint had found enough leverage to flip them both over, rolling twice and coming to a stop with a thud against something hard. Larger pebbles and debris began pelting them and Clint was a heavy, horrible weight on top of him, holding him down, trapping him. Through the haze in his head, he could feel Clint's mouth moving against his cheek, could feel the shouted words on his skin, but the sound was snatched away. He was hauled closer and shoved him down one last time, forcefully, and the physical message finally pierced the litany of 'run, run, run' Tony's his head. Stay down. Stay put, it said. Tony squeezed his eyes shut and held on to Clint, clung desperately to him.
And then the heat rolled in.
Tony gasped. He pushed his face into Clint's jacket, pressed his whole body closer, desperately trying to find some kind of protection, but the heat was merciless, curling like a living, terrible thing around him.
His screams were lost in the roar.
Burning. He was burning.
Tony slowly blinked back into muddled consciousness. The ground spun lazily under him for a few seconds before setting down. Over the ringing in his ears he heard fire crackling somewhere close, and the air was thick with smoke and the smell of Sulfur. He licked his lips and tasted blackboard chalk and blood. It took a few moments to get his eyes to focus properly on the tree trunk that was lying at an angle above him, no more than a foot away from his face. He was still staring at it when a massive rumble vibrated the air around him, and he tensed.
The volcano. The running. Clint's ankle. And that had been a pyroclastic flow and it had hit them and he was still alive. How was he still alive, how had he not burned to death? A hint of orange flickered in the near complete darkness beyond the tree trunk as he tried to curb the panic that rose in him, but he wasn't quite successful, because maybe he was dying from burns and didn't know it yet. Absence of pain meant little, because he knew that if the burns went deep enough they killed the nerve endings, and even with more moderate burns adrenaline and shock had a way of completely suppressing the pain response. He'd read narratives from Hiroshima survivors as a kid, and wow, that had been a bad, bad idea. There hadn't been any pictures in the heavy history book (the one everyone told him was too hard for him to read, it was for grown-ups), but with his imagination it hadn't been difficult to picture the horrible injuries, the blackened, scorched skin split open like sausage, with patches sloughing off, hanging like ragged ribbons from arms and legs and hands.
He really wanted to just lie here and never look at himself, because if he didn't see it, it wasn't real, not just yet. But Tony had never been real good at willful ignorance, so he closed his eyes for a moment, steeled himself and then lifted his arms, slowly and painfully. All of him was covered with pale dirt, but underneath it all he could see whole, undamaged skin on his hands. He let his head drop back to the ground and closed his eyes.
A second later, they flew open again.
Clint.
Where was Clint?
He shifted, lifted his head as far as the tree would allow. His breath hitched as his nervous system woke up and informed him that the not hurting period was over. He ignored the onset of aches and pains, because he realized most of his lower body was pinned down under a very unmoving Clint.
"Barton?" It came out a hoarse croak. He coughed and tried again. "Hey, Clint."
He reached down gave Clint's shoulder a little shake. Clint groaned. He was alive. Thank God, he was alive. Tony couldn't find the energy to wiggle out from underneath the dead weight so he stayed where he was. He poked at the back of Clint's head. His hair seemed to have survived mostly unscathed. "Clint?"
"Muh," was the muffled answer.
"My brain didn't boil," Tony felt the need to say.
"Glad t' hear it," Clint mumbled hoarsely, his face buried somewhere by Tony's midsection.
Tony laid back down and wiped the back of his hand over his eyes. He regretted it instantly. His skin suddenly felt raw and tender, and he shook his hand, trying to get rid of the prickling that was growing. In seconds it had deepened into a heated, unrelenting kind of pain that made his eyes water. He lifted his poor hands to his mouth and tried to blow the ash and dirt from his fingers so he could get a better look, because fuck, the pain was deepening and they were hurting like a bitch now, like they'd been dipped in acid, and maybe there would be ribbons after all, maybe it just took a while.
Clint shifted, displacing an inch of pumice and dirt and ash from his back in the process. He pushed off of Tony with a groan. The back of his head hit the tree with a dull thud.
"There's a tree above your head," Tony said, belatedly.
Clint managed to twist his body enough to squirm out from under the tree. "Yeah. Thanks," he rasped. "I noticed." He crawled a few feet and collapsed on the ground.
It took Tony a moment to work up the will to move, but eventually he rolled over and followed, twisting and backing out from their little nest on his knees. He squinted at the eerie grayness around them. The thick ash cloud still blocked the daylight, but enough crept through to reveal a forest that looked very different. Trees lay broken and splintered around them, scattered across the undergrowth that was covered by a good three inches of gray gravel and stones. What few trees remained standing were bare, stripped of branches and bark on the side that faced the summit.
His slumped down on the ground next to Clint. The painful sting had spread to his face. He brought his hand up and touched the skin on his cheek. He hissed. Coarse sandpaper on the sunburn from hell. Times ten.
"You hear that?" Clint asked hoarsely.
"What?" Tony strained his ears. They were still ringing, but it was fading.
"The volcano. It stopped."
Tony realized Clint was right. The forest had gone silent. The ground was no longer trembling. There was a crunch of pumice and gravel as Clint turned on his side to face Tony.
"Hey. You okay?"
Tony shook his head no, then yes, because he was light years away from okay, but he was breathing and decently mobile and that had to do for now. He would indulge in being not-okay when he had put some more distance between himself and this fucking volcano, because silent or not, Tony was not going to stick around, that was for damn sure.
"Your turn to be bleeding," Tony said and made a small motion with his finger in the direction of the vivid red that trickled through the grit on Clint's skin before dripping to the ground. Tony could see that his face and hands were flushed where the skin wasn't hidden by dirt and ash, signs of what could be first degree burns. Maybe second. It was hard to see.
Clint coughed and lifted his head, looked around. "Did we just survive a pyroclastic flow?"
Tony shook his head. "I think we just caught the very edge of one. If it had hit us for real, we wouldn't be talking."
"Lucky that was there," Clint said and nodded towards their little sanctuary.
Tony gave it a closer look. The tree under which they had woken up lay flush against a large boulder that had been half eaten by the slope over centuries. The two of them had been huddled up against the flat side of it, downslope of the volcano. During the few seconds Tony had been busy panicking, Clint had searched for and identified a shelter, he realized. The boulder had offered some protection, and thanks to the small overhang, most of the debris must gone right over them. Plenty had still rained down on them and Tony brushed his hands down the front of his jacket before he could remember that that was a spectacularly bad idea.
"Ow, ow, ow." He held his hands stiffly away from his body, fingers splayed.
Clint rolled over and got to his knees. "We can't stay here." His raspy voice was tight in a way that told Tony he wasn't the only one hurting. "Another flow could come, or the volcano could start up again." He pressed the back of his hand lightly against his cheek, then his forehead, and made a pained face. "Fuck," he hissed.
Both of them looked up when a diffuse bolt of reflected lightning lit up the darkness, and then in short succession another. The rumble of thunder that followed made the air around them tremble, and Tony realized that was what had shaken him out of his fog. Even though the volcano had stopped venting, the ash in the air was still feeding the electrical storm.
Steadying each other, they got to their feet. They set off through the eerily silent landscape, staying away from the massive swath of debris and burnt vegetation that the main flow had left behind. Tony realized they'd been less than two hundred yards away from the core of it, from ending up like that much charcoal.
It was slow going, but they kept moving.
The ash cloud eventually lifted a fraction, and darkness turned into colorless dusk around them. The volcano remained silent. So did the forest around them. No birds were heard. No rustling in the undergrowth. No insects. They made the decision to circle back around, to try to find the jet that had been hidden a mile and a half from the compound, on the other side of the newly risen volcano. Too damn close for comfort for Tony, but the guys might be here, waiting for the two of them to make their way back. Tony didn't hold out hope that the jet would still be operational. If his suit had been compromised, then the jet sure as hell had, too.
It took several hours, but they made it to the other side of the volcano while keeping a decent distance to the summit (though it was nowhere near enough distance to sooth Tony's very loud concerns). They had emerged from out under the ash cloud and the landmarks were still there, which meant finding the jet wasn't too hard. By the time they did, daylight had faded. This time from natural, non-volcano related reasons. Night was approaching fast.
They stood silent at the edge of the clearing, staring down at the small basin they had chosen to touch down in. The jet was wasn't where they had left it. It lay at the far end of the clearing, pushed up against a jumble of broken trees, half on its side. For a moment Tony thought it had sunk into the ground, but then he realized what he was looking at. A lahar. A brown river of melted ice and mud had flooded down the mountain at some point, flattening everything but the largest trees and dragged the jet with it for a good two hundred feet.
"Romanoff!"
Tony started at Clint's shout. "Jesus. Give a guy some warning, will you."
Clint ignored him. "Rogers! Banner! You guys in there?"
No answer.
"They would've heard it," Tony said, his eyes back on the mudslide. "Right? If they were here, they would've heard it and been able to get to safety. It doesn't look too large. It couldn't have moved that fast, either. I mean, some of the trees are still standing here. They would've heard it."
"Right," Clint nodded grimly. "We should try to get inside. Maybe it's still operational."
"I doubt it, or they would have flown out of here, but let's find out. We should get off ground level anyway, in case another one of those mudslides comes."
The lahar had turned more or less solid when it lost speed, and Tony managed to climb onto the wing that was angled down towards the ground, its tip buried in the mud. He reached down and helped Clint up, then carefully edged his way along the wing towards the fuselage. The slippery mud under his boots was not helping one bit, and he kept sliding on the slick surface. It was more luck than skill that kept him from taking a tumble. It would probably be easier to crawl on his hands and knees, but his hands were hurting too damn bad to even contemplate it.
"You think we could dig it out?" Clint asked.
Tony looked back over his shoulder. Clint was peering down at the mess that had trapped the jet. Tony shook his head. "Forget it. When this stuff loses momentum it settles like concrete." He easily located one of the emergency hatches on the roof and had the hidden locking mechanism disengaged within seconds. When he got the hatch open, he got down on his front and stuck his head into the dark jet.
"Guys? You in here?"
No answer.
"I'm going in," he told Clint. He didn't move for a moment, trying to figure out some way to lower himself down that didn't involve such intensive use of his messed up hands, but he quickly realized that there was nothing to do but to suck it up.
Dropping down into the dark jet was every bit as painful as he feared it would be, and because of it he probably let go little too soon, because the drop to the deck was longer than he expected and he landed heavily, the air forced out of his lungs.
"You okay?" Clint sounded worried.
"Yeah." He looked around. There was still some ambient light left outside, but with the windshield of the jet covered with mud and dirt, the inside was pitch black. He looked up as he heard scraping against the hull. Clint's head and shoulders appeared in the hatch opening as a black shape against the darkening sky.
Tony navigated the inside of the jet by touch and memory, and found the storage compartments in the back.
"Get one of the flashlights," Clint called down to him.
"Way ahead of you," Tony answered as he turned on the heavy duty emergency flashlight. He bit back a wince at the cold, hard light that suddenly invaded the dark cabin. Blinking the phantom shapes and colors from his eyes, he retrieved another flashlight before heading back to the hatch and holding it up for Clint to take. Despite stretching as high as he could, Clint still had to lean halfway into the jet to reach it.
Tony made a quick round of the rest of the jet, just to make sure no one was lying injured or dead in some hidden corner.
Long shadows shifted restlessly as Clint moved his light in an arc towards the back, then back to the front. "Anyone?" he asked.
"No. They're not here." Tony sat down in the pilot's seat and went through the power up sequence. Nothing. He toggled the manual power switches to the comm system, but with the same result. Not a flicker. Not a beep. He leaned heavily against the backrest. "Dead."
Clint sighed. "Right." He made another sweep of the flashlight around the inside of the jet. "We need to grab some things. First, find us two survival suits. They're on the other side of the bulkhead there."
Tony got to his feet. Clint had more experience with surviving dicey situations than he had, and he was more than happy to let him take the lead here. He found the bulkhead and pulled out two bagged suits.
"Empty the bags," Clint told him. We'll use them to carry stuff. Then get the first aid kit. There." Clint shone his light towards another set of cabinets further back.
Tony's burnt hands didn't approve of digging through the contents of the bulkhead compartments as directed by Clint, but he kept going. Water, emergency rations, select medical supplies, a handheld radio, flares, two more flashlights. Ropes, a repelling harness, Mylar blankets. Two handguns (no, not that one, the other, to the right. Yes, that.). Tony spent a few minutes rattling off the markings on the various ammo boxes, letting Clint tell him which ones to bag and which ones to leave. Tony pocketed a good old fashioned compass. At the moment it would be useless, the electrical storm was making the needle spin drunkenly, but hopefully the ash in the air would be carried away by the winds and the earth magnetic field would soon start making sense to the poor thing again.
He tried every single one of the side access hatches in the vain hope that he wouldn't have to climb back up, but too deeply buried in the mud to budge. With a sigh, he uncoiled one of the ropes and tied it to the two bags. He tossed the free end of the rope up to Clint and watched him hoist them up. The rope came snaking back down a few seconds later and Tony started tying knots. Knots that knotted over other knots, creating larger knots. He spaced them out by about two feet. That would give him something to grab and push off from.
"I'm gonna have to get down to the ground," Clint told him. "Find something to anchor it to. Heads up," he warned, one second before the repelling harness smacked into Tony in the head, the carabiners jingling merrily. The second rope had already been secured to the belay loop. "You climb the rope, and I'll help as much as I can with this one."
"Okay." Tony kneeled and looped the end of the knotted rope through one of the many load securement anchors recessed in the deck, and tied it off. He strapped himself into the harness, tightening all the buckles as he listened to Clint sliding back down the hull. He looked up along the two ropes and waited for Clint's go ahead. Minutes passed and he had just started to worry when the rope he was about to scale went taut, and then he felt two sharp tugs on the belaying rope.
"Okay, Stark!" He heard Clint's voice from outside. "Go ahead."
Tony was about to start pulling himself up when he suddenly remembered what he had forgotten to grab. "Hang on!" he shouted. "Give me some slack on the rope." It was the work of seconds to find two pair of gloves, the kind used for heavy lifting. He stuffed one pair into his pocket and pulled the other pair on. "I've got gloves," he shouted. "You want a pair?"
"I'm not crawling back up there. Just climb."
Getting up was every bit as painful as Tony had envisioned, but it was mercifully fast, with him climbing the rope, and Clint pulling some of his weight with the other. Despite the help was still short of breath as he heaved himself up onto the roof of the jet. "Ow, ow, fucking ow," he moaned.
"You okay?"
"I'm never using my hands for anything ever again." Tony closed his eyes and tried to shake his hands out. It didn't help. "I'll write a new routine for Dum-E to feed me, and dress me, and…" He paused. "Maybe I'll let U take care of the personal hygiene stuff, I'm not sure I want Dum-E anywhere near my soft bits." He rolled to his side stiffly and sat up. He spotted Clint next to a robust looking tree which had been used as an anchor. "You?" Tony asked. "You okay?"
"I'll be better once we get some distance from this damn thing."
"Twenty-two miles, at least." Tony started scooting back down the fuselage.
"I was thinking something like two thousand." Clint looped the rope back up and stuffed it into one of the bags. The other rope, the one anchored to the deck in the jet, was left behind as they headed out again.
They didn't cover two thousand miles that night. Not even twenty-two.
An hour out, the ground shook violently a few times, and mere minutes after that, the volcano started venting behind them again.
The ground started leveling out, too far from the volcano for it to have been pulled up into a slope by the growing mountain, but it was still rough terrain, and four hours later Tony was stumbling more than walking, and keeping Clint on his feet was becoming a mission impossible. Clint was sounding decidedly ragged, too, so when Tony suggested a break, he didn't argue. They didn't stop right away, not until they found something that, with a little imagination, could be called higher ground. Mudflows and pyroclastic flows were still a threat, and neither of them was particularly keen on getting caught in one.
They found shelter under a large, dense pine tree with drooping branches. Tony curled up and watched Clint get a fire started. The wood was damp, and the fire sputtered and hissed unhappily, the flames barely illuminating Clint who was trying his best to infuse it with a will to live.
Their temporary shelter smelled like fire and mulch and wet dog. Tony sniffed at his filthy jacket. Yep. The wet dog was them. He pulled the bag he'd been carrying closer, meaning to retrieve one of the thermal blankets, but reconsidered when the pain in his throbbing hands flared up again. Fuck. He needed to find out what damage had been done. He needed to see. Trying to touch as little as possible, he pulled out the first aid kit and tore a single-pack wet wipe open with his teeth.
He pressed the cool, white wipe against his raw knuckles. He knew he was going to have to rub to get the crap off, but he just couldn't make himself do that just yet. There was no way that wasn't going to hurt like a mother. He looked up as Clint scooted over next to him and picked the wet wipe from his stiff fingers without a word. He started wiping lightly, gently.
Tony ground his teeth. Oh, yes. Like a mother.
Clint went through seven wipes before he'd finished with Tony's hands. Then he cleaned off Tony's face and neck just as carefully. Tony still swore under his breath the entire time.
"All done." Clint dropped the last filthy wipe on the ground.
Tony took a shuddering breath and peered at his red hands. His fingers were a little swollen. He had a couple of small blisters that had started to weep clear liquid, too, but nothing bigger than a nickel. First and second degree, as he had predicted. So fucking unfair. Something that for the most part looked like nothing shouldn't possibly be able to hurt like this.
He motioned Clint closer and returned the favor. He went slowly and slowly started uncovering Clint's flushed skin and a few blisters. Looked about the same as Tony's. Clint suddenly hissed sharply and made to pull away, but aborted the movement immediately. Tony winced. "Sorry, sorry." Clint made no more sounds, but the way he clenched his jaw made Tony start to worry about the health and continued survival of his molars. "Almost done," he promised.
"Thanks," Clint mumbled when Tony had finished. He turned his hands over and scowled darkly at them, like he was taking offense at the pain.
With that taken care of, Tony wrapped the thin metallic blanket closer around himself. The temperature had dropped further over the past hour, and his breath was a cloud of white. The cold air soothed the burns, but the rest of him was freezing. His damp clothes didn't help.
"You know, for some reason I always associated volcanoes with warmer climates when I was a kid," he said. "They were exotic and as far as I was concerned everything exotic was found in warmer countries. But now, with this experience under my belt, I'm pretty sure I'll forever associate volcanoes with freezing my ass off." He grabbed his bag and motioned for Clint to lift his injured ankle.
Clint shifted and propped his boot up on the bag. "I'm creating a brand new no-go list. Volcano-adjacent places I will never set my foot in again."
Tony nodded in approval. "I'm never going to Napels again, that's for damn sure."
"Sicily with Mount Etna."
"Tokyo."
"Mount Fuji is pretty far from Tokyo, you know."
"Not far enough," Tony said.
"Hawaii goes on my list." Clint sounded a little wistful. "No more hula girls for me."
"Iceland. The whole damn country."
Clint pushed the first aid kit at Tony. "There's Tylenol in there. Not much, but better than nothing.
Tony's mind gave a little squeal of joy at the thought of painkillers, even if they were just Tylenols and probably wouldn't make a dent in the throbbing pain. He dug out the little white bottle and shook out four pills. He swallowed two dry and gave the other two to Clint.
Clint's eyes were locked on the volcano. Upwind from the ash cloud their view was undisturbed. Fragments of molten rock and magma were still being ejected from the crater, painting red streaks against the night sky, and a river of glowing lava snaked down the now distant mountain. The rumble had increased in strength again, now was a near continuous, low-frequent vibration that rattled their bones even at this distance. Lightning still lit up the ash plume that rose from the summit.
"If they can control the earth like this, that's seriously bad news," Clint said.
Tony nodded. In the few moments when he had not been panicking and running for his life, he had thought the same. It would be the ultimate blackmail tool. Give us what we want - power, money, territory, weapons – or we will turn your country into a wasteland. Setting something like this off in the wrong place could result in thousands of casualties. Maybe more. They had to make sure they got their hands on that tech and destroyed it along with any other prototypes and design documents. They couldn't afford to let this weapon (because that was what it was, a potential weapon of mass destruction) fall into the wrong hands. Any hands.
Clint pulled the hand held radio into his lap and Tony watched his thumb run across the transmit button. They'd tried every half hour to get into contact with the guys, with anyone, but all they had gotten was more static. It didn't mean anything, he reminded himself. Electrical interference, nothing else.
Morning broke with the onset of a cold, slow drizzle. The volcano had gone silent again during the night, and this far it had yet to start up again. Neither of them had slept.
Tony chewed an energy bar without much enthusiasm. They all tasted like cardboard to him, but he was hungry and needed the energy to keep going. He was just tearing open a second one when the sharp, loud crackle of the radio damn near scared him to death. Clint snagged the radio and turned the volume up. Another couple of sharp crackles were heard. It didn't sound anything like a human voice, but it was more than the white noise static that was all they had gotten the previous day.
Clint brought the radio to his mouth. "Romanoff, do you copy?"
Static. Then a burst of crackling again.
He waited until it stopped. Then waited another ten seconds. "I can't hear you. But in the off-chance that you can hear me, I've got Stark with me. We're south-west of the volcano. Eight, nine miles out." Clint looked around, and Tony realized he was looking for landmarks. Tony pointed at the ridge that ran down the valley, at the distinct u-shaped interruption to the smooth skyline. Clint described it to the silent radio.
There was an agonizing ten seconds of silence, then the radio crackled into life again. More unintelligible sounds.
"Right," Clint mumbled and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. They were still red-rimmed, sore looking from the irritation of the ash. "Let's try something else." Tony watched him press the transmit button in a burst of longer and shorter taps.
Of course. Morse code. Tony wasn't a hundred percent sure about the prosigns (he needed to take a refresher course as soon as he got back home), but the bulk of the shorthand message Clint sent out was clear. Clint and Tony here. We're some 9 miles south-west of the damn volcano. Be a doll and get us the hell out of here.
A responding string of staccato radio noise came. Most of it didn't mean anything to Tony, but he hoped R-O-M was for 'Romanoff'. And Clint apparently thought it was, because he closed his eyes and huffed out a small laugh. The sound was all relief. "Good ol' Natasha," he mumbled.
"The others?" Tony wanted to know. "Ask about the others."
Clint held up his hand a fraction. "Wait. She told us to hold until she gets back to us."
Two long minutes later, the radio came to life again. Tony heard another pearl string of shorthand crackling, one that translated into things like 'everyone on this side is okay', and 'we're locating you as we speak', and 'stay put'.
"Thank God," he mumbled into his hands. "Thank God." He looked up. "Tell her to bring pizza, because I'm starving. The emergency food in this jet is disgusting."
Clint rolled his eyes, but couldn't quite seem to let go of the tired grin. "They're survival rations, Tony, not fine dining."
"If I had to eat this for more than a day, I wouldn't want to survive. I'm replacing the whole lot of it when we get back."
They settled in to wait. Not even the freezing rain felt so bad any longer.
They were rescued by air. Not by quinjet, but by a white and red SAR helicopter belonging to the local emergency services. The terrain wouldn't allow the pilot to land, so Tony and Clint were left to hunker under the brutal downwash of the Super Puma, waiting to ride bitch on a rope with one of the winch crew.
Tony went first, and Steve was waiting in the cabin when he cleared the edge, grabbing him and pulling him onboard. Steve was in a flight suit, with a headset over his ears and a band aid over his chin, but other than that looked fine. He looked clean, suspiciously like he'd had the chance to take a shower, and Tony was deeply, deeply jealous, because the ash and dirt was everywhere, and it was itching and disgusting and the rain was making it cake and stick in ways it hadn't before.
Clint was brought up and then they were both sitting strapped into seats, being tended to by efficient crew members. Clint grabbed a headset and was talking before Tony managed to get his hands on one.
"— 're fine," Steve was saying when Tony got it situated over his ears. "Natasha is a little banged up, bruises mostly, but they want to x-ray her wrist to make sure it isn't fractured. But you know her, she won't rest until the work is done, so when they made the mistake of trying to make her leave the evacuation zone, she told them where to shove it. And that's paraphrasing it quite a lot."
Tony batted irritably at the hands of the medic that was insisting on touching his jaw and cheek.
"Tony," Clint said. "Let him look at that cut." He met Tony's eyes for a moment, then the eye contact was broken when Clint's head was tilted back by the second medic. Clint blinked rapidly as the man started rinsing out his eyes. Tony suddenly looked forward to the same treatment very much. His eyes felt like he had spent the past day and a half in the the sandstorm of the century.
He sat back and tried to relax as the medic cleaned out the cut on his face. He got a bottle of water in his hand and then it was his turn to have his eyes rinsed out. God, that felt amazing. He felt the helicopter bank to the side and he wiped at this eyes and got a look at the changed landscape as they gained altitude. The barren summit that hadn't been there yesterday morning. The scars after lahars and pyroclastic flows and lava that cut through the slopes and the plains beyond. Gray ash. He saw several fires still raging below. Much larger areas were still smoldering, and they stretched for miles and miles and miles.
Like a miracle, only two people died in the eruption. The two runners Clint and Tony had been tracking. The remote location and the relatively limited size of the eruption had saved them from more casualties. Tony protested the description 'limited', because it sure as hell hadn't felt limited when he'd been in the middle of it.
He and Clint spent two days in a hospital, mainly for the doctors to keep an eye on any delayed respiratory distress. Analysis of the ash showed the particle sizes hadn't been small enough to cause chronic lung damage, but what it did cause was a stubborn dry cough that lasted two weeks for Clint and over three for Tony. They both left the hospital with corticosteroid inhalers and topical Lidocaine spray for the most painful burns. Clint's ankle was not broken, but there were ligament injuries, and he spent two weeks on crutches. As usual he refused the under arm ones and went with the more easily maneuvered elbow crutches. Natasha's wrist, on the other hand, was broken. She got out of the hospital with a vividly pink cast, looking very pleased about it. No one dared comment. Not even Clint.
A thirty mile no-go zone around the still sleeping mountain was quickly established once the authorities snapped out of the shock of suddenly having a tectonic impossibility in their backyard. The excavation and investigation work went on for months, but there was no trace left of anything that even remotely looked like it could be the catalyst to the spontaneous volcano eruption, and none of Tony's (or anyone else's) efforts yielded any result. There was nothing left of the compound, nothing, so any documentation that was left behind had been destroyed. All of the scientists and support staff had been accounted for (including the two casualties), and the ones alive had been thoroughly debriefed. Only two of them seemed to know anything about the insta-volcano device, and both of them had been the kind of fanatic HYDRA followers who preferred to suicide before giving up any of their secrets.
A number of different agencies from different parts of the world were caught sniffing around the perimeter of the no-go zone, and Tony had to admit that he was kinda relieved that nothing was ever found, because something like that would be dangerous in anyone's hands.
"Can I ask you something?" Tony sat down across from Natasha in the common kitchen. Four months had passed since his and Clint's mad dash down the mountain.
"You can always ask," she said mildly.
"So…. Was SHIELD really involved in the Mount St. Helens eruption?"
She looked up, eyebrows raised. "Not that I know of."
Tony studied her, looking for signs of a lie he knew he wouldn't find even if she was lying through her teeth. He gave up with a sigh. "You wouldn't tell me even if it was true, would you?"
"No." She took a sip of her coffee. "But just out of curiosity, why do you ask?"
"Barton said— Well, he didn't exactly say say it, but back when we got to enjoy that pop-up volcano he implied quite heavily that SHIELD had been involved somehow. He had some pretty detailed information about the whole thing, and I'm thinking— "
She huffed a laugh into her coffee. "Don't be an idiot, Stark. He has always had this morbid fascination with volcanoes. He knows all kinds of useless tidbits. Ask him about Tambora or Krakatau if you ever want to spend half an hour listening to him geek out."
"Who's geeking out?" Clint walked into the room in full desert fatigues, carrying his gear and a duffel bag.
"You," Natasha said. "About volcanoes."
"You lied," Tony accused and stabbed a finger in his direction. "You preyed on my vulnerability at a very difficult time, and you lied."
Clint arranged his things on the floor by the door. "Doesn't sound like me." Natasha snorted inelegantly. He headed to the fridge and pulled out a juice bottle and stuffed it in one of his many pockets. "What did I allegedly lie about this time?"
"Mount St. Helens." Tony crossed his arms.
Clint frowned, apparently not connecting for a moment, then understanding dawned on his face and he turned to Natasha. "You didn't."
She gave a small one-shoulder shrug.
"Aw, Nat," he whined. "I had him. I fucking had him, and you just had to come and ruin it, didn't you?"
"It's not funny, you know," Tony told him. "Winding me up like that. Making me all excited with the possibility of things.
"I beg to differ. It's very funny."
"You, Clinton Frances Barton, are an evil, evil man."
Clint grinned unrepentantly and snatched the unopened yoghurt from in front of Natasha. "That's for snitching."
"Where are you off to, anyway?" Tony asked.
"Giving a certain unnamed one-eyed guy a hand with some stuff in an undisclosed country, on a continent that shall remain nameless, too."
Tony and Natasha looked at each other. "Yemen," they said at the same time.
"You guys are so cute when you do that. I'm already late, so I gotta split. If I'm not back in a week, ten days, give Old Yeller a call and ask where he lost me." Clint grabbed his bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. "Later."
He was halfway to the elevators when Tony remembered something. "Hey, Barton! Hang on. I got something for you." Tony snatched the flat, silver foil package he had brought to kitchen and jogged after him. He tossed the package to Clint, who snatched it from the air with ease.
"What it is?"
"Remember I said I was going to revamp the emergency supplies in the jet?" Tony pointed at the pack in Clint's hand. "This is the revamped stuff. Part of it, anyway. Give it a try. Let me know what you think."
Clint eyed the pack dubiously. "Is this payback of some kind? Will I spend the entire flight puking if I eat it?"
"Trust me, my friend, my payback - when and if I chose dish it out - will be much more refined than emetics or laxatives."
"Will it explode?"
"Refined, Barton. Look it up."
Clint grinned and stuffed the pack in his pocket with the orange juice. "Okay. I'll let you know."
Tony returned to the kitchen where Natasha had helped herself to another yoghurt to replace the one so rudely stolen by her partner. "What was that?" she asked.
"Emergency rations for our jet. I almost lost the will do live out there during our volcano adventure, and that was after half a day of those demoralizing pouches."
"They're for survival, Stark. Maximized caloric and nutritional intake."
"They're horrible. So this right here here's one of the things I'm going to stock up on before we head out next time." He retrieved another pouch from the counter and handed it to her. "Try it. It's beef."
She turned it over in her hands a few times, then pulled it open. She poured the contents of the pouch onto the table top and started sorting through the items. Smaller silver foil bags, a plastic spork, condiments, wet wipes. "Good old MRE style," she commented.
"Yep. Why change a winning concept. It's got everything you need and it's easy to use, lightweight, durable."
She walked to the tap and tore open the largest pouch with her teeth and held it under the tap, filling it with water to the line on the package. "You're tasting this before I do," she told him firmly as she placed the pouch in the sink and watched steam start to rise from it. "How long does it take?"
"Three, four minutes."
"That's not bad."
"Three hundred percent improvement without compromising the quality of the food. Yeah. It's not bad."
They stood watching the steam rise, until a metallic 'plink' was heard.
"That was the dinner bell, m'dear." Tony dug out a fork from one of the drawers and stepped up to the sink. He speared one of the cubes of meat and blew on the steaming piece for a moment, then popped it into his mouth. Perfectly tender, perfectly seasoned. He smacked his lips a little extra, and grinned when Natasha fetched the spork and fished out a piece of meat for herself.
She chewed slowly, taking her time before swallowing and washing it down with a sip of water. "This is nice, Tony. Really nice."
Tony bounced a little on his toes, warm satisfaction flowing through him.
"What's the shelf life?" she asked.
"Five years, minimum."
"Room temperature?"
"Yep. No refrigeration needed."
"Nice." She went for another piece of meat, then pulled open the vacuum packed pouch with crackers. "Do you have meals other than beef?"
"Sure thing. I've got chicken madras, creole chicken, I've got three kinds of vegetarian dishes, I've got lasagna, burgers, soup, a bunch of desserts. I can put together a five course meal next time we head out and crash somewhere horrible."
"Can we sample them?" she asked. "I want to try them."
Tony hadn't expected that. Natasha rarely expressed wishes. She pursued them without hesitation, she did and said and took what she wanted, but those two words ('I want') were guarded like secrets. But surprised or not, Tony was more than happy to show off his work, so they spent the evening eating their way through his whole menu, from breakfast to starters to side dishes to main courses. And of course dessert.
Somewhere in the middle Tony's watch buzzed and he saw a text from Clint.
'Tried it. It was okay'
"It was okay?" Tony echoed. He was surprised to realize the lack of enthusiasm stung a little. This was so much better than the crap that was stored today, and Tony had worked hard with it. Okay, so he personally hadn't worked hard with the food, he'd hired gastronomic professionals for that, but he had worked on the heating and the packaging, and all the rest that had to come together for the food to not taste like airline fare that's been thrice reheated. "You ungrateful bastard," he muttered. At least Natasha seemed to appreciate his labor.
He looked up when her phone dinged a few seconds later. A bright silver bell kind of sound. She shook her head with a small smile and tilted the screen for Tony to see.
'OMG so much better than the regular crap SO MUCH BETTER'
Her phone dinged again and another message came up.
'Don't tell Stark I said that'
Tony grinned.
~ The End ~