When I came back to myself the only thing I knew was a nuclear headache. not to mention as I kept coming back to my senses, the cold dry air. my body felt stiff and hard as a rock, just as all of it did. my throat was dry as the Sahara. not being totally convinced that this wasn't a complete result of bad drinking, I slowly opened my eyes. the lights were dim so I'm guessing that it was night. I blinked knowing I was looking at a ceiling. a ceiling made out of rock. the pieces out together as I placed last night together. the gala, the drinking, Christine, celibacy, and the dart. someone had kidnapped me, and put me in a cave. The aura that Afghanistan had filled me, water boarding, oh no. I felt my breathing go berserk, as I began hyperventilating. the dark cave, Yinsen, pepper, oh captain America. it was slightly chilly but enough to remind me of Siberia. Bucky Barnes trying to take out my reactor, Steve just straight up going in to kill it as a whole.
My world had turned into a nightmare, and I longed for a glass of scotch, whiskey, wine something to calm my nerves. my panic attack felt like pins and needles. I felt the blood rush, as nothing but fear seemed to run through my body. A tear rolled down the side of my face, then I heard a whimper. I would've thought it was me but it was far too high pitched. turning to the direction of the sound my blood ran cold.
Laying down across from me was a girl that was young, college girl young. I could tell she was deep in sleep, but as another whimper came out of her I was suddenly aware that we were in this together. by the size of her muscles and body as a whole, whoever put me down here wasn't her. then I saw it in her chest, angry at myself for not noticing it right off the bat. A car battery around where her heart should be.
I jumped up slowly but the dizziness caught me for a moment and I had to take a few moments to breath. I came back quickly though and ran to her side. yep it was a car battery, a sob cracked through me. carefully I opened her shirt, doing my best not to look at anything she wouldn't like me looking at. Her bra and shirt were torn where they had put it, meaning it was put there by the people who snatched her. there were scrapes, cuts, and bruises all around her body. Her kidnapping was a lot harsher than mine, I saw where the dart went in into her neck no doubt putting her to sleep longer than me. I brushed her long hair away from her face. gosh she was too young for this to have happened. feeling around nearly all of her ribs could be seen and felt. poor girl.
Sitting up I knew that she would need an arc reactor, and then I would need to replace the palladium in it. wouldn't want her getting palladium poisoning. but how, who knows how long we would be wherever we were. I looked around, we seemed to be in a bedroom in the cave, with two small cots with thin mattresses on top of them. the 'room' was small and obviously was only meant for the two of us. I saw no cameras in here though, what did they want from us?
Warily I left the girl, knowing I would need to come back quickly to check on her state later. She needed all of those cuts and scrapes checked out, not to mention the messy problem of the car battery inside her. Walking out of the room I noticed that the cave was large and slightly furnished. kind of like the really fancy TV show about weird houses.
Their was a tiny kitchen with an refrigerator, a gas stove usually used for camping, and a faucet. then opposite to that corner was a ton of boxes. like someone was prepared to move in, but they were just left there. then one blanket, with some sort of thing that could connect cots so that they would be like a queen cot. walking over I grabbed the first box and tore it open what do I find, instant mash potatoes. Cringing in disgust I keep going. all the food we have is either instant, freeze dried, or stuff like cereal. that's all we have. we have a lot of it though, and some seeds, so their has to be a garden room somewhere in the cave that I can't find. I kept going though, being bored out of my skull as I kept finding the boring food. we had enough of it to last us at least two years, maybe more. It was a fact that terrified me. How long they intended to keep us here, I had no idea. at least in Afghanistan I knew why that had me in Yinsen, a fact they made fairly clear. especially when I questioned what they wanted. further down I found basic things like toilet paper, soap, conditioner things that for basic necessities. Like with the food it all came in bulk, and were the kinds you'd find in motels and stuff. Basic t-shirts, shorts, and underwear came next. It all resembled the great needs stuff, trying to imitate the name brand companies that just would kind of suck and no one would buy them. genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist, now living not even to the name brand standards. looking around this 'room' of the cave I saw no cameras or any other monitoring devices, once again. why was I here?
But I kept going through the boxes having nothing else I was ready to do yet. Eventually I found something useful, kind of. tools for making stuff, but they were all plastic. strong, yet all at once useful. then I found something else that gave clues to who ever took us. they stored little blocks of metal, palladium, and anything I would need to recreate another mini arc reactor for the girl. speaking of which, I got up and went back so that I could check on her condition. glancing at her she was still sleeping, I took a breath of relief. going back I was wondering many things one being who the heck this girl was. I'd never heard of or seen before in my life. I was tony stark, I was iron man, people knew who I was, and knew what I was capable. but this girl, if she ended up anywhere important I'd know about it. I'd hacked every database that I could get to no matter how unrecommendable it made me. but sitting down again I noticed the cool temperature constantly surrounding where we were. It wasn't changing, and I had been up for about four hours if I was counting right. because I had been drugged and we were in a cave, my body clock was ruined. I could feel it getting colder though which would be bad if it kept going. out of all the things they packed us warm clothes and blankets weren't one of them. In fact we only had one blanket to share in between the two of us. This could be a problem depending on how it was when the girl woke up. this poor girl was probably going to take this even worse than I was. Finally though I hit the jackpot. medical equipment, band-aids, wipes, every kind of bandage. grabbing them I went back to the presumed bedroom where the poor girl was. kneeling at her side I carefully began fixing and bandaging her. much less to say there was a lot to bandage. she was especially thin and frail looking with deep bags under her eyes I noticed. the world had her exhausted, and I guessed she'd keep sleeping because of it even after the drugs wore off. Paying more attention than when I first say her I saw how short she was naturally, petite even. I had never really paid attention to the shorter girls, but once you get rid of the exhaustion and scrapes, adding maybe twenty pounds to her frame she was goddess like. Even with the traits that might need to be worked on she was beautiful. and once again, young. it was bad for me to feel this way about a girl this young who I hadn't spoken a word to or even see the color of her eyes. I was bandaging her all over, her soft baby like skin like silk on my rough calloused ones. it was intimate in ways one would never understand, I could feel the heat radiating off of her.
She had a seemingly endless amount if scrapes and bruises, even more so on her upper body, kind of explaining the arc reactor. have to do something to keep the shrapnel out of her heart. It took hours to take care of the scrapes that I did and still she had more. what had they done to take her, I wasn't aware, but it was awful. when I was finally done, it was getting colder and colder by the second letting me know the sun was probably down in the cave with no heating in it we had. being the gentleman I was I gave her the one blanket we had, curling up on my cot feeling hungry,worried, and cold falling asleep in my first day of captivity.