You Won't Know, an avengers fanfic

You Won't Know

2017

I do not own the Avengers, obviously.

So they say,
They say in heaven
There's no husbands and wives
On the day that I show up
They'll be completely out
Of their forgiveness supplies
And I can't use the telephone
To tell you that I'm dead and gone
So you won't know

-You Won't Know, Brand New (2006)

Someone was screaming. It slowly pierced into her consciousness, like a finger trying to poke through the rubber of a water balloon,and the realization that the sound was screaming broke through just as suddenly and violently as a balloon pops.

Someone was screaming. Someone was screaming like their very soul was being ripped apart, like they were being burned alive from the inside out. The sound was more animal than human, a screeching, keening sound without words or cadence. What was happening? Why couldn't she open her eyes? She needed to see so that she could know whether to fight or flee, or whether she could help The Screamer. Oh, Gods, what if it were one of her parents, her brother, or her friends? Had they been captured; were they being tortured? Had she been captured? Where was she? Why couldn't she remember? She wanted to open her eyes, to move her head and look for The Screamer, but she couldn't. She despairingly thought it may be her fear that held her, but she wasn't a coward…was she? She did not want to be a coward, but in this moment, she thought that she may be that very thing. But, she thought that maybe, maybe it was okay to be a coward now. Almost anyone would be cowed by this screaming.

Someone was screaming. Why wouldn't they stop? Why won't they STOP? Shame filled her to admit that she wanted it to stop, not out of compassion for The Screamer, but because the sound was filling her with more fear and dread than she had ever felt in her young life and she did not want to be afraid. She was even more ashamed to admit that another part of her wished that they would not stop, because if they did, would whomever or whatever was causing The Screamer to scream move on to her next? Would she be made to scream like that as well? She did not want to scream like that. Something in her mind seized and shuddered with a bourgeoning terror as it quickly began to reject the conjured images of what could cause someone to scream like that. Fuzzy images of dead, hateful eyes shrouded in shadow staring down at her, surrounding her, trapping her, hurting her… NO! She shoved the image away. She was afraid. She was so tired of being afraid. She wanted her mother. She tried to call and hold a picture of her mother in her mind, but it would not take shape. Her mother's visage kept being replaced with the shadowed faces with the hateful eyes. How cruel one's imagination could be sometimes. Mummy, she cried, help me, mum. Please help me. But she knew her mother wasn't here, and no help would come.

Someone was screaming. In the darkness, the sound felt like a million tiny shards of glass piercing her ears and slowly sinking into her mind. It would drive her mad if it continued. How could someone scream like that for so long and still be alive, still be sane? However, the time it had taken for these thoughts to occur was only but a second, and not the agonizing terror-filled lifetime that it seemed to be. Another second ticked past, and someone was still screaming. Another second, and her mind finally caught up with her reality. It slammed into her like a freight train. The pain, like the sound of the screams, turned on like someone had flipped on a light. Her eyes shot open, but were unseeing. Red spittle spurted and foamed around her cracked lips from where her vocal cords and esophagus had long ago torn open. More blood came in a steady stream from her nose, and still more dripped from her ear canals. Tears tinged with crimson flowed from her wide, blank eyes to pool in her matted hair that was the only cushion against the unyielding hard floor she thrashed against. Her hands spasmodically clenched so hard that her fingernails had mostly been ripped off and were embedded in the palms of her hands, only to be driven deeper into the ruined tissue by digits that were fractured from being repeatedly slammed into the wet floor. The floor was wet and the wet was warm and smelled like copper coins. She was laying in her own blood. Mummy…mummy, it hurts.

Someone was screaming. The pain was coursing through her like electricity, it felt like every nerve in her body was on fire. Her muscles contracted and relaxed and contracted so quickly and violently that she must be flopping around like a fish on this floor, covered in her own blood. She vaguely hoped that it was only her own blood, and took comfort, however small, in the thought that her family and friends were not here to bleed and hurt with her, or to have to hear these screams. Maybe she was not a coward after all. If she was alone, she was glad. She did not want anyone she loved to be subjected to this living nightmare. There was a slight tinge of regret, that no one would know what happened to her, assuming no one knew where she was. She hoped her parents would be able to bury her body, to have that closure. She did not want them to go on wondering if she were alive or dead. She hoped that wherever he was, that he was happy, and that he would not feel too sad if he learned of her death. The sudden realization that she was going to die did not frighten her, only the thought of this pain never ending frightened her now. If she could have laughed, she might have laughed at having been so afraid of the screaming. But that was before the pain hit. The screams were nothing now. Now there was only The Pain. She was ready to die. Through the agony, the darkness began to fade outwards to white, and then blue. There was a blinding blue light. The light blinded her just as much as the darkness had. Black or white, blue or green, it was no matter. She couldn't see anything but the light, and she no longer cared.

All the while, someone was screaming. The force of her entire body smashed into the hard surface below her. She must be convulsing incredibly hard, she thought detachedly; she hadn't even realized she had come up off the floor. But the convolutions had stopped. She was finally still. She felt the weight of what must be the universe pressing down on her, as if she were descending further and further beneath the ocean and the pressure was crushing her. She no longer breathed, the pressure on her chest was too great for her lungs to inflate. It would not be long now. Slowly, the blackness began to fade back into her vision, or what she perceived to be her vision in her mind's eye. No, it would not be long now. Finally, blessedly, the pain ended.

The screaming had stopped.

Tony Stark was a man who prided himself on his ability to take charge when the unexpected happened. Hell, he was a man who prided himself on many things. He was, after all, a genius, a billionaire, etcetera, etcetera. But above all things, he was a genius. His mind was a constant buzz of thoughts; a never-ending hum of information being absorbed, examined, filed away, retrieved, and applied. That's how he was always able to assess, accept, and appropriately respond to any situation that has ever arisen without even blinking an eye, in what (ironically, he snorted to himself) seems to others to be the blink of an eye. That's why, hours later, he would find himself sitting gloomily in the dark quiet of his lab with a glass of yet untouched scotch gripped tightly in his hand. He had frozen. He gripped the glass even more tightly at the thought. Vaguely he realized that he was in danger of breaking the tumbler and even worse, wasting this good scotch. He downed it in one gulp and forced himself to place the receptacle gently on the nearest table. His eyes unfocused once more as he returned his full attention to his memories of the day. His hands were uncharacteristically still.

A girl, who looked like she had been chewed up and spat out of the mouth of some giant beast, had in fact been spat out of the machine on which Tony, Bruce, and Foster were currently working. The machine was one of their own design (adapted from Foster's original work, with input from both Tony and Bruce) that was powered by both arch reactor technology with a little bit of tesseract thrown in for good measure. Only Tony had not told anyone about the hydra weapon he had squirreled away in the aftermath of the attack on the helicarrier. A feeling, something that could have been guilt – he wasn't sure – began to creep into him and he quickly quashed it. Fury had been nothing but duplicitous and underhanded, why shouldn't he employ some of the same tactics? Besides, he no longer made weapons and had no intention of ever making them again. This was for science, for the good of mankind. And he had made damn sure that no one would ever get their hands on what he had taken. He didn't even have records of it stored anywhere but in his own mind. Not even JARVIS was privy to the information of its existence in the tower. Tony mentally shook himself from that train of thought.

The girl. The girl – a mere child, he thought. She couldn't have been any older than 18, at the most. Possibly younger. It had been difficult to tell anything about her other than that she was female, and appeared young. And this had only been apparent because she wasn't wearing any clothes. Oh, and someone had tortured her. Tony physically shook himself this time to remove the image of the girl-probably-child's naked and mangled body. The machine had powered itself on, and for a heart stopping moment of terror Tony remembered what he had been told about Loki's arrival through the tesseract and had begun to plan his quickest path to the nearest Ironman suit. Before he could even twitch a muscle, an ear shattering scream blasted forth from the blue light at the middle of the machine like a shock wave and it froze him in his tracks and his thoughts. She had landed on Tony's clean white lab floor with a sickening and somewhat wet sounding smack. The blood splattered around her body in a disturbingly beautiful, in a sense, cast off pattern. The dark red droplets haloed out around her like a fairy ring. And Tony had frozen. For the first time in his life he had been rendered…stupid. His brain had stuttered to a halt, along with his mouth and the rest of his body. His colleagues were in a similar state. Not even JARVIS had spoken. They were all frozen, staring, mouths gaped open like a fish, at the battered mess of human being in front of them. JARVIS, of course, was the first to find his voice.

"Sir, I do not detect any respiration, but there is a weak pulse."

To what would be Tony's never-ending chagrin, Bruce was the first to act. He rushed forward and was on his knees next to the girl, taking her pulse and checking for breath before Tony had even thought to blink. Even more infuriating, Foster had been close on Bruce's heels, ripping off her lab coat to use to cover the girl's nakedness. Tony recalled a moment of confused amusement that he had seen but not even processed the girl's bared breasts and other parts, before he realized that had been because she was completely covered in blood. That would explain the wet sound she made when she hit the floor, as well as the halo of blood spatter surrounding her. There had been gaping slash wounds across her torso, and Tony shuddered when his mind's eye recalled what he thought were bite marks – human bite marks – on her breasts. He knew now that they were. The girl's arms and legs stuck out from under Foster's rapidly-becoming-no-longer-white lab coat and Tony's eyes quickly looked over and catalogued more slashes, cuts, and bites. Her hands looked to have been tightly clenched but had slowly opened after she hit the floor. Tony saw that her fingernails looked to have been ripped out, that they looked to have been embedded in the flesh of her palms. He looked away, disgusted. His mind still hadn't caught up. He didn't even hear Bruce barking out orders, or JARVIS quickly and efficiently reading off the results of the multiple diagnostic scans he was completing. He didn't hear anything until Foster, with a strength he didn't realize her tiny frame possessed, bodily shoved him out of the way so that she could punch in the override code on the door and allow the tower's medical team to enter the room. The cacophony of the chaos drenched him like a wave. And still, Tony just stood there. He didn't say a thing, and he didn't move again until after the girl had been hurriedly removed by an efficient, but no doubt baffled, medical team. They had quickly intubated her and restored her breathing before rushing her from the room on a gurney. Tony only hired the best, and they were the best. They had done their job without hesitation and had asked no questions – not that he would have any answers should there have been any questions, he groused to himself. Although she had not yet awoken and it was uncertain as to whether some of her many, many wounds would yet prove fatal or debilitating, it appeared that she may live. An exploratory surgery to check for internal injuries undetected by scans had in fact uncovered quite a few, and the bleeding had been successfully stopped both inside and out. The chief surgeon – that Tony paid a seven-figure salary to be on call at the tower, one of the best in the world – was optimistic that if she made it through the night that she may physically recover.

Physically. The implication being that she may not recover mentally or emotionally, something Tony knew about all too well. He jerked himself to his feet so suddenly that if there had been another person present they would have yelped in surprise, for he had barely moved and had uttered not a word for the past several hours that he had been sitting pensive in his private lab. But he did not move again. He resumed the silent and motionless vigil in this standing position. His brilliant mind was flipping through the inventory of the girl's injuries without his conscious desire, his horror and disgust and his rage at human beings (for he assumed that human beings had caused her injuries) growing with each review. He finally forced himself to steer away from the image of the girl's broken, bloody figure and the list of injuries she had sustained and to focus instead on how the fuck she had come to be spat out of the machine in his lab on the 97th floor of Avengers Tower in Manhattan. Where did she come from? The medical team had attempted to clean up her face so that a photograph could be scanned by Tony's facial recognition software, but her injuries and bandages along with the breathing tube obscured her features too much for this to be at all a fruitful endeavor. The facial scan would have to wait for her to heal. Was she even from earth? All JARVIS's scans and the tests performed by the medical team and Bruce suggested that she is human, as none of her physiology matched that of Thor, Loki or even the Chitauri. JARVIS did find some unusual energy readings coming from the girl, but they could be some remnant of something given off by having been apparently teleported from God knows where by a machine powered by tesseract energy…not that Tony could tell anyone about that part. Deep down, Tony was afraid that if his teammates, his friends, knew what he had done – they would leave him. He knew without a doubt that Steve would not forgive this trespass, and he didn't think he would be able to recover from his friends leaving him. He had barely survived Pepper's…escape. Yes, if he was being honest with himself and why shouldn't he be, she had escaped from him. Tony was incredibly insecure for a genius, billionaire…yadda, yadda, yadda. He could admit that, but only to himself. And only when he was drinking.

With that last self-reflective thought, Tony nodded and marched over to pour another glass of scotch. He finally felt that his mind had caught up with this new, unexpected and as it was – exciting – situation. He was confident that he would figure out the mystery of the girl. If anyone could do it, he could. He was Tony Stark, for fuck's sake. He would have to solve this mystery on his own. He wanted to help the girl, yes. He was horrified by what had apparently been done to her. He wanted to know who had done it and why – he wanted to say that he could not fathom why anyone would torture a young girl in such a way, but he would be lying. Even beyond the mundane explanations such as psychopathic and sadistic sexual deviants preying on random young women, there were possibilities that the girl was some sort of agent or solider who fell into enemy hands. After all, he knew that Natasha had begun her career at a much younger age than the girl appeared to be. Yes. He would make sure the girl was helped. She would have the best medical care money could buy, and even if it turned out that she was an enemy Tony would not regret having helped. He could not abide torture. Not after having experienced it personally. Tony also wanted to know how she came from wherever she was to being transported by the machines power. Maybe it's linked through the tesseract. But Thor had removed it from earth, along with his bat-shit crazy brother. But, Tony thought snidely to himself, he had hidden away some of the tesseract's power…had taken it from SHIELD. Obviously SHIELD, and god knows who else, had the same idea as Tony. God, Tony desperately hoped that the girl had not been tortured by SHIELD. He would not be able to handle that revelation. But, he supposed it didn't matter. The girl would not be going back through any portals, and nothing else would be coming through after her. He knew that he should find out if there were another tesseract powered object on earth, but he did not think that he could do that at the cost of his own life - of his friends. If he could do nothing else, he would heal the girl's body and keep her safe from whatever she had been pulled away from by the machine. That he could do. Besides, no one else could ever know about what he had done to the machine. In fact, no one else would know. He would make sure of that.

He gulped down the glass of scotch and absentmindedly poured another and drained it as well. He placed the empty glass back on the counter, took a deep breath and held it. Exhaling, he grabbed the bottle of liquor and walked quickly out of his private lab and down the hall to the lab where the incident had occurred earlier that day. JARVIS automatically opened the doors and they swished closed behind him. Tony purposefully did not look at the girl shaped mass of dried blood and gore that had yet to be cleaned from the floor as he stepped around it to the machine. Tony vaguely wondered if Bruce and Foster were still in the medical bay, watching over the girl. Wherever they were, they weren't here and that was exactly what Tony needed. He reached up to a small panel that would be very difficult to spot if one was not looking for it and placed the pad of his thumb against it. After a heartbeat, it clicked and a small slit opened. Out of it, a small, blue, rectangular disc popped out. Tony slowly took the disc and placed it in his pocket. The small slit in the machine disappeared once again. Tony took a swig directly from the bottle of scotch. Then he turned, and while still avoiding the carnage on the floor, walked out of the lab.

Only a little over six hours too late, Tony had taken charge of the situation.

Author's Note:

Well, this has been my first attempt at fan fiction writing (whatever I wrote about NSYNC when I was 13 does not count, I insist). As of now, it is a one-shot, that I finally decided to try my hand at while on vacation in a foreign country and am holed up in a flat alone while it rains outside. Please excuse any terrible spelling or grammatical errors, I've given it a few read overs but you never see them all.

So, if it's not entirely obvious, the inspiration for the girl is Hermione Granger. However, in my head and if I ever expanded this story line she would not be at all a canon version of Hermione nor would she be from a canon version of HP. Sometimes shes a different person that is just basically Hermione. You know how your head canons work. The Avengers in my story also don't really exist in canon. Not terribly off, just the typical tweaking of plot and time lines to fit my fancy.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this weird little one shot. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you may have or suggestions for where the plot might go. I have several ideas but they are constantly in flux and sometimes it's hard to keep a hold of one in my mind. I like stories that at least attempt to stay somewhat grounded in reality (which is funny, considering the source material lol), but you know what I mean. I dislike magical fixes for everything, and am not even entirely sure that the girl has any magic. It really could go in 30 different directions.

Now I'm rambling. Feedback would be greatly appreciated, it might be nice to start flexing a creative muscle and suggestions may help motivate me onward.

Thank you for reading!

-IAmJacksCompleteLackOfSurprise