aichmophobia
(fear of needles)
Ever since the accident - well. Ever since the accident Bruce's life had been divided into two parts - 'before' the rest of his life, and 'ever since' his world went crazy. There had been so many changes since that time, some good, (mostly) bad, that it was hard to even keep track of all of them, to remember that this wasn't always normal for him.
But ever since the accident, Bruce had been a little bit uncomfortable indoors. Not just in tight, closed quarters like the corridors of the Helicarrier or the military base, but even in wide-open areas with tall ceilings. Bruce couldn't help the itchy feeling that the walls and ceiling were closing tight around him, even when there was meters of free space on every side.
He just felt the uncomfortable sensation that he should be taller, bigger, wider in every direction than he really was. And he couldn't be rid of his new awareness of just how easy it would be to break down these thin cardboard walls around him and get back into the free air.
The inside of the refinery managed to capture the feeling of being chillingly barren and messily cluttered at once. The roof overhead was high, at least twenty feet up, and lacked any kind of drop ceiling to hide the mess of bare pipes and wires that spilled in discolored bundles across it. Lights hung in regularly-spaced intervals from the intersections of the beams, but none of them were lit; somewhere in the darkness above, leaks in the roof let a slow steady drizzle of Thor's rain in. The rafters themselves almost sagged with the weight of curdling paint and flaking rust that dripped down like hairy icicles, mold and cobwebs hanging in sheet curtains from above. Where each support beam met the wall it left a long wet stain of rust across the wall beneath it, ending in a dark puddle on the floor below.
Light shone up from somewhere on the refinery floor, but it was hard to find the source of it - hard to see more than a few yards in any direction, in fact, for the open-plan floor was cluttered with ancient-looking machinery. Huge, elaborate arrangements of turbine engines and conveyer belts, storage drums and sorting troughs, pressure-wheel valves and hydraulic stamps and mechanized arms poised frozen in mid-air. To their right, a gigantic set of cogwheels sat locked in permanent stillness, the rust coating their gears and axles preventing them from moving; to their left, a gigantic set of rusting metal shelves with ominously warping legs threatened to topple their overloaded contents onto the walkways below.
Narrow alleys wound between the banks of machinery and the metal grids of the shelving units, but the floor of the factory was... cluttered did not cover it; in some places it was buried under a rising sea of refuse and debris. The hard, dirty concrete was only intermittently visible between sliding falls of crumbled brick, loose stacks of pipes, rotted splinters of wood and even less savory things. Where the concrete did peek through it did so with an ominous gleam of dark puddled liquid, either rainwater or oil or a mixture of both.
"Looks like this place has been abandoned for years, not days," Steve commented, sounding unnerved.
"They call it the Rust Belt for a reason, Cap," Tony responded, his voice coming out of the vocalizer flat and tinny-sounding. He clanked forward, never quite as graceful on the ground as he was in the air, kicking aside piles of refuse as he went. "Little mining towns like this one have been bleeding money and population for decades. Probably they couldn't afford to afford to keep it up, but also couldn't afford to shut it down - it's the only source of employment in a fifty-mile radius. So it just keeps running until the whole thing rusts down around their ears."
"The lights are still on," Natasha said softly. She seemed relaxed and poised, gun held barrel-downward as she peered around the stacks of shelving; only someone who knew her well could have caught the hint of unease in her voice and her eyes. "The rest of the town is completely out."
"A place like this probably has its own generators," Clint said, peering around. "I mean, they made the fuel for the rest of the town, here."
"Maybe the townspeople retreated here when the rest of the town's power got cut," Steve said, ever the optimist. He raised his voice and shouted, "Hello? Anyone here? We're the Avengers and we're here to help!"
Steve's voice ratcheted through the vaulted chamber, echoes chasing each other through the rank shadows. For a long minute, there was no other sound in the refinery other than the rain dripping steadily down.
Then, somewhere on the far side of the building, one of the machines started up. It had the racking, revving noise of a chainsaw preparing to bite into wood or metal, but with a dozen other mechanical voices mixed in. The lights on the walls and ceiling flickered and shifted in response to some movement, but from their current position they couldn't see where the noise or the light was coming from. The Avengers looked at each other, unnerved.
"Well," Bruce said. "That's... not promising."
"It doesn't necessarily mean anything," Tony said flippantly. "They could be automated, set to turn on at a set time or something."
"There's no point in sitting here guessing. We're supposed to be getting down to the lower levels," Natasha reminded them.
"Yes, but we're also supposed to be doing search-and-rescue of the town's citizens. If they've taken shelter in here, we should at least check on their status," Steve said decisively. "Let's try and find the source of the noise."
"There's a catwalk running along the top side," Clint noted, having picked out the high vantage points as soon as he walked in the door. "I'll get up there and take a look."
"I'll go with you," Tony said immediately, and with Steve's nod and signal the two of them boosted off the dirty ground floor and swarmed (or rocketed) their way along the catwalks. The rest of the Avengers began to follow along as best they could on the ground, cautiously picking their way over the piles of shifting debris and ducking under the extruding arms of the machines.
Bruce hung back a little, letting the others establish a perimeter before he followed along behind; he took the opportunity to browse the shelves a little bit and pick up a few spare pieces for the device he was constructing. He wouldn't trust the integrity of any electronic parts left out in this wet and dirty environment for more than a few days, but he figured you couldn't go wrong with a screwdriver and a glass plate.
He eyed the banks of machinery dubiously as he ducked around them. Bruce was in STEM himself, and he'd taken a year's worth of courses in engineering back at MIT, but he had to admit he had no idea what half of these machines were for. He'd always been interested in the more... abstract side of things, and not really into heavy machinery. A few things, he could reasonably guess were involved in the sorting, handling and processing of raw coke, but some of the other banks of machines just looked... strange. Too many sharp edges and too many saw teeth, too many chains hanging off into nothing.
"I'm not seeing anyone in here, Cap," Clint reported back from his vantage on the catwalk; Bruce could see his shadowed form moving over a suspended walkway overhead. From this distance and in this lighting, Bruce could hardly see him, but he knew better than to discount Hawkeye's sharp eyesight. "Just machines and more machines."
"Not picking up anything alive on the sensors, either," Tony's voice crackled over the comm. "This place is completely deserted."
Disappointment was clear on Steve's face, but he nodded acceptance of the negative results. "All right, we'll start making our way downstairs," he decided. "Iron Man, Hawkeye, do you see any sign of -"
At first, Bruce mistook the faint vibration under his feet and the rumbling in the air for residual noise from the nearby machinery. Not until the shelves to his left started rattling ominously did he realize what he was feeling: the very ground beneath his feet was trembling, and getting louder every second.
Bruce had first noticed the tremors out on the street, but he hadn't thought anything of it at the time - they were so faint and passed so quickly as not to be any kind of a threat. The same wasn't true any longer; these tremors were stronger, causing the concrete underfoot to ripple dangerously and the metal shelving to creak and groan as their topheavy structures were pushed out of their fragile equilibrium.
"Watch out!" he yelled, probably redundant given that the noise and jostling was unmistakable now. The shelves close to him were rocking dangerously now, a few loose items sliding forward to pelt him like painful, heavy rain. He flung up one hand to shield himself as he flailed about with the other for something to grab on to, his feet unsteady on the loose and shifting ground.
Bruce looked about wildly, panic beginning to rise as he realized there was no safe route to get away from the shelving that was about to come down on his head. The aisle he was standing in ran left and right without a break, and the trash scattered underfoot made for treacherous footing. He scrambled awkwardly back the way he had come, as the lesser of two evils, but had only gotten a little less than halfway to safety before the ground gave one final jolt and the shelving unit came sliding down.
The next moment Thor was there, one arm shooting over Bruce's head to brace the half-ton metal structure in the process of crashing down. The contents of the shelves continued to slither and rain down all around him, and Bruce ducked and covered his head with both arms as he climbed and scrabbled over the mounds of debris towards a clear exit. He was almost there when one ankle twisted painfully on a loose brick, and he fell half forward onto his elbows and knees.
A strong black-clad hand reached for him and grabbed his hand, pulling him briskly towards clear ground. Bruce gratefully took hold of Natasha's arm and let her tow him along to safety, glancing briefly over his shoulder as he did to see Thor still bracing the shelving unit with one hand.
"Clear!" Natasha called to him and Thor glanced over his shoulder, saw Bruce standing safely free and jumped backwards, letting the mass of sharp and rusting metal come roaring down on the spot he'd been a moment earlier.
The three of them took a moment to compose themselves, catching their breath in the drifting dust and flaked metal in the aftermath of the tremor. "Are you well, Banner?" Thor asked earnestly, seemingly unfazed by the near-disaster, his blue eyes concerned only for his teammates.
"I'm fine," Bruce said, still catching his breath. He glanced down to see his half-assembled device still clutched in one hand; he hadn't even thought to put it down in the panic of the moment. "A little bruised and shaken, but nothing serious."
He glanced over to see Natasha studying him intently. "I'm a little bit surprised you're still with us," she observed.
Bruce blinked. He hadn't really thought about that; he wasn't angry exactly, not at the moment, but the elevated heart rate and the pain of the bruises he'd collected would normally be enough to have the Other Guy struggling for control. "So am I," he said, surprised and a little bit confused.
"Hey, you guys okay over there?" Tony demanded over the comm. Bruce glanced up to see Tony and Clint still clinging to the catwalk overhead; Clint nearer to them, Tony a little further off. "What the hell was that just now?"
"Earth tremor," Bruce supplied helpfully. "We had a few outside, as well, but you were in the air most of the time so you probably didn't notice."
"Well, great," Tony said, completely disgusted. "Seismic activity, that's just what I'm looking forward to when we're about to head undergrou -"
His complaint was cut off mid-word as the metal catwalk he and Clint were both standing on twisted and warped, then snapped completely, dumping both its passengers straight down onto the bank of machines below.
Which picked just this moment to churn into life.
The nearest turbine roared alight, fan blades picking up with unholy speed as the gears and belt leading towards it engaged. The teeth of the gears caught at Clint's clothing and dragged him inexorably downwards, his hands grabbing frantically at mid-air and catching nothing. From this angle Bruce couldn't see exactly what got Tony, but he disappeared from sight like a man being sucked into quicksand. His repulsor blasts fired once, twice, but he must not have been at an angle for it to do any good, because the screeching roar of the machinery didn't falter.
Steve moved first, as fast as thought: he turned and threw his shield with pinpoint accuracy, jamming into the gears of the belt dragging Clint towards his death and grinding them to a halt. The machinery shrieked and rumbled, gears grinding agonizingly as the metal teeth tried and failed to chew through the indestructible material of the shield. Steve vaulted onto the edge of the belt and grabbed Clint's flailing hand, leaning backwards to throw all his weight against the pull of the machinery. "Thor! Help me first!" he shouted over his shoulder, calling the Asgardian to his side. "Trust Tony's armor - help Clint!"
The shouting and clamor rose about him and Bruce clutched at his ears, trying to regain some kind of control out of the chaos. Natasha was at his side, then gone; she had hold of Clint's other arm and was dragging him back out of the deadly maw of the machine, a rent torn down his leather vest and the top of his leg and blood streaming from it freely.
But that still left Tony in the grip of the rogue machine, and if he could blast his way free he would have done it already, and this was no place for mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, reaching inside of himself for the beast he spent so much time, so much sweat and so much blood struggling to maintain.
Now, he urged to the Other Guy inside of him. Tony's in danger. We need you now!
There was no answer.
"Bruce!" Natasha shouted at him; when Bruce opened his eyes she was on her knees beside a groaning Clint, applying pressure to the wound. "We need the Hulk. Tony's still in there!"
Bruce looked around; he saw Steve and Thor both struggling with a wire monstrosity a dozen yards away. The wreckage of another machine that had been in their way sat sparking and twitching between them, but Thor dared not swing his hammer or call lightning while Tony was trapped. The two of them were fighting against the machine that seemed more and more alive the longer Bruce looked at it; huge pistons flailed at the sides like the legs of a spider, and steam hissed from valves in the front that could almost, if one had an overactive imagination, form a face; grotesque and unsmiling, with pilot flames burning in the eyes and a mouth full of hundreds of tiny jagged fangs.
Desperate, he clenched his eyes shut and called once more within him, carelessly throwing all his pain and fear for Tony and fury that this had happened to them, that an inanimate machine would think to threaten Iron Man, would hurt what was his, his; he pulled it into himself and shoved it into a boiling rage, driving and lashing the beast within him to respond. Come out! Now! Come OUT!
Somewhere, Bruce heard the sound of a bestial howl of fury.
But it wasn't coming from him.
"Bruce!" Natasha screamed at him. "Hurry up!"
"I'm trying, I can't!" Bruce screamed back at her. She shot him an incredulous look that flensed him to the bone, then in the next moment she was up and sprinting towards the melee.
"Help him!" she snarled over her shoulder, and Bruce quickly stumbled over to Clint's side and dropped to one knee beside him. The archer was already trying to sit up, groggy and uncoordinated; there was blood flowing from his head as well as from his side. Bruce pushed him gently back down and checked his head wound; it was bleeding copiously, but didn't look terribly serious.
Natasha had left her pack with the medical supplies with them, bless her (Bruce didn't tend to carry supplies, since pretty much anything he carried tended to get dropped or crushed when the Other Guy emerged.) Bruce pulled out gauze rolls and antibiotic wipes and applied them automatically, most of his mind racing on the complete inexplicable fact of the Hulk's refusal to show up.
There was a crash from behind him, the sound of more repulsors firing, and then the shriek of tearing metal. Abruptly the sound of the engine died from a roar to a whine, the turbines thumping restlessly as they died into silence, and when Bruce looked up again Thor was pulling Tony out of the wreckage of the machine and to his feet.
"I'm okay, I'm okay," Tony kept repeating over the comm, and despite knowing full well how often that statement was a lie when Tony said it, that was all that kept Bruce from leaping to his feet and running to his side. He tottered a few steps, then sat heavily on a (completely inert) pile of rubber tubing. "Hang on a moment, camera's busted, I can't see a thing. Holy shit, that was like being caught in the autodismantler on meth."
"Easy my friend," Thor said, steadying him easily despite the weight of the suit.
"I can hold it," Clint mumbled, putting his hand on the gauze pad next to Bruce's, and Bruce gave him a quick distracted smile and lurched to his feet, hurrying over towards the others. He took Thor's place by Tony's side, and helped him as rigid and inflexible armored digits groped clumsily for the manual-release switches on the faceplate. Bruce's own fingers were trembling more than a little, and he didn't breathe easily again until the metal plate cleared and he saw Tony's eyes clearly once again.
"I'm okay," Tony said again, softer now that the words were spoken to Bruce's ears and not just to the static airwaves. Bruce slid his hands along Tony's cheeks, fingers twining in the short black curls that escaped the edge of his helmet to frame his face, and sighed with relief.
"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, calling them back to the present moment. "Iron Man? Good. Hawkeye?"
"I'll be fine," Clint said, only slightly feeble. "It's just a flesh wound, it'll be fine once it stops bleeding. Doc did a good job patching me up."
Steve looked at him and nodded. "Then we need to get back on our feet and move. This place is more dangerous than we thought. Unless we know what caused that machine to go haywire, we don't know that any of these others could do the same at any moment."
"Are there more of that same kind?" Bruce asked in alarm.
"I know not," Thor said. "But we will not be taken unawares again. Let us seek out any other traps that lie in wait, and destroy them before they may try to destroy us."
Shortly after that, the Avengers were back on their feet and fanning out through the factory again, much more wary and cautious than before. The narrow, twisty aisles wouldn't let them walk more than two abreast - especially not if they wanted to stay out of arm's reach of the banks of machinery on either side - so they broke into three pairs, each careful to stay within sight and call of the others.
"Do you know exactly what we're looking for?" Bruce said dubiously. "I didn't get a good look at it before it got... dissassembled."
"Not really," Clint replied. "It was just another hunk of metal until Iron Man and I fell right on top of it. I could swear, though, that it was completely dead before then. Like it was just waiting - shit."
The yelp echoed around the cavern, swiftly summoning the others to them. Steve and Natasha arrived from the right, Thor and Tony from the left, and the entire team just stopped and stared at the apparatus before them.
"Fucking hell," Clint swore, and Bruce couldn't really think of anything else to say to that.
The machine in front of them now was... It was a machine. Bruce could feel confident saying that much. It had a solid metal frame reinforced with struts, a wide open-backed square with ratchets to adjust the size of the open square. It had levers and it had gears, big heavy square-tooth gears ready to spin up and turn force into motion: pushing, pulling, grinding.
But there were other things attached to this machine that Bruce didn't understand. Didn't want to understand. Like the big saw-toothed blades extending from metal arms that hovered over the open gap, waiting for the gears to turn to descent. Like the huge open-gauge needles, the fine pincers poised to dive in and rip and tear. The long, stained funnels and troughs running off to each side and under the machine to carry spillage away.
Like the perfectly human-sized shackles hanging empty at each of the corners, welded tight to the frame.
Steve was the first one to find his voice, half-strangled by the look of sick fascination on his face. "What were they doing in here?" he exclaimed.
"Homebrewing Soylent Green, maybe?" Tony suggested, although the humor - gallows-dark to begin with - fell flat.
"This is the blackest magic," Thor said, his face dark and clouded. "I have never seen its like before."
Bruce shook his head, averting his eyes from the wide red-brown rust stains - God, he hoped those were rust stains. Due to the high amount of iron content in blood, it looked functionally almost identical to iron oxide when it corroded. "There are some questions I don't think need to be answered."
"This one might, though," Natasha said quietly. Her face was set, her expression cool as she faced the machine, although Bruce caught a tiny quiver in her voice that belied the stoic exterior. She was not truly emotionless, merely very, very good at controlling her emotions. That was something Bruce could understand, like no other. Sometimes he wondered if, should Natasha's control someday break, it would be as disastrous for her as a similar loss of control always was for him. "If the townsfolk were... experimenting... with paranormal forces, it might go some way to explaining what happened here."
"Or if they were taken over by some outside force," Steve theorized hopefully, providing a less-damning explanation, "which took over and used this building as a base. Either way, if we could figure out who it was - AIM, maybe, or HYDRA -"
"I don't think we need to go that far afield for an explanation," Clint interrupted. So far he'd been the only one with the stomach to venture closer to the grisly machine, although he was careful not to touch it. "We can just ask Iron Man what it's for."
"Why me?" Tony exploded. "Just because I'm the engineer, you think I know anything about every machine that was ever built? Why would you ask me as if I'd know?"
Clint looked up at him, and his expression was dark. "Because this thing has the Stark Industries logo on it," he said.
"WHAT?" A wash of static followed in the wake of Tony's shout. As a group, they all scrambled to look where Clint was indicating - and just as he'd said, there was the familiar logo. A stylized, slightly misshapen globe, capped with an elongated chevron, with STARK INDUSTRIES printed underneath.
Hesitantly Steve offered, "Is it possible that - someone in your company authorized this without - without you knowing?"
A moment of silence, no one quite sure what to say, before Tony broke it. "No," he said. "No. That is not... that is not an SI product. Look at it. It's not - it's not even the real logo, for fuck's sake. The shape is distorted, and the font isn't - It's just some kind of knock-off." He backed away, as though he could distance himself from the monstrosity before him just by moving away. "Even before the reorg I set off when I became Iron Man, Stark Industries didn't do... this stuff. We didn't make farm butchering equipment, or get into kinky fetish shit like this, we just made weapons."
"Weapons made to tear people apart?" Thor asked..
"No!"
The strain in his voice worried Bruce, scared him. Bruce knew the signs; Tony was halfway on the way to a panic attack, getting more and more wound up with every second. This was no time for that, no place; Bruce couldn't talk him down if they weren't in a safe place, and this was as far from 'safe' as you could get. "Tony," Bruce said quietly, reaching forward to take Tony's elbow. "Remember your heart. If you don't calm down..."
Natasha's sharp, clear eyes landed on him. "You seem remarkably calm yourself, Doctor Banner," she said.
That was enough to deflect some of the attention from Tony onto Bruce, and he wished he could be more thankful for it. "What do you mean?" Bruce said, shifting uneasily.
"Come to think of it, you reverted back from the Hulk especially fast this time," Steve said, scrutinizing Bruce carefully.
"No he didn't," Clint said. "He never went Hulk at all. He was with me the whole time, treating my leg. Not that I don't appreciate the assist, Doc."
"What?" Thor frowned. "But I heard the Bulk's battle cry. I am most sure of it."
"That wasn't me," Bruce said quietly, before the three of them could get into another argument. They turned to stare at him in astonishment.
"You said you can't," Natasha said. "What do you mean? I thought the trouble was making sure the other guy didn't come out."
"It is, usually," Bruce said emphatically. "I don't know. I don't understand it, either. He should have come out five times over by now, and yet..." He folded his hands across his chest, groping for words.
It was doubly hard - not only were there not any usual words in the English language designed for communing with an alternate personality who lived inside your head and had a body of his own, but he hated talking about it. "I can't reach him. Inside. Usually I can hear him, even when he's not in charge, but - he's not there any more."
The more he concentrated, the more sure he was, and if the circumstances were different he would have celebrated. Alone in his head, in his body, for the first time ever since. Quiet in his mind, peaceful in his soul - it was everything he'd ever wanted, and given up ever believing he could have again.
And of course, because it was his fucking life, it had to happen at the absolute worst possible time.
"But if he's not in you any more," Steve said slowly, obviously struggling to grasp the concept but willing to trust Bruce. "Then where ... is he?"
The distant roar sounded again, echoing through the refinery, and all of them went still.
"How is this possible?" Natasha demanded.
"I don't know, but apparently it is," Bruce said.
"Hang on," Tony said, standing abruptly and clanking towards Bruce. His face was a study in worry as he grasped Bruce's upper arm, a mix of anger and tight fear. "If the other guy is missing, then then that means - you're vulnerable down here."
Bruce blinked. That was an aspect of things he hadn't even thought of. "I... guess so, yeah," he said slowly.
"We're all vulnerable down here, if the Big Guy isn't on our team," Clint said flatly.
Tony seized Bruce's other arm, pulling him around to face the inventor. "Then that means, you have to go," he said urgently. "We need to take you back outside, back out to the Quinjet."
"Tony, what are you talking about?" Bruce demanded. "Why?"
"I mean you're in danger!" Tony said tightly. "Normally the Hulk, he watches your back... yeah, he watches out for all of us, but no matter what happens you wouldn't be hurt while he's in charge. But if he isn't here, then you're completely defenseless!"
"We haven't got time to go back and start over," Natasha started. Tony whirled to face her.
"Then we'll fucking make time!" he shouted. "He's just plain human now! Don't you guys get it?"
"Half of our team is 'just plain' human, that has never stopped us," Natasha snapped. "We don't run away from things just because it gets a little dangerous!"
"What I get is that our biggest asset just turned into our biggest liability," Steve said. Bruce felt mildly offended by that, but he supposed he couldn't really argue with either half of that sentence.
"Tony," Bruce interrupted him, and Tony turned back to him, a terrible expression on his face. Bruce let his voice go gentle. "You need to calm down. I'm not in any more danger than I was a few minutes ago."
"And you could have been killed, a few minutes ago!" Tony shouted. "This isn't a game any more. You could get hurt!"
"Well so far, I don't have a scratch on me," Bruce said mildly. "While you're the one who's just been put through a blender."
"Hey, what am I, chopped liver?" Clint piped up from the background.
Tony waved that argument away with a dismissive hand. "That doesn't matter," he said.
Bruce ignored Clint, looking Tony straight in the eye. "Is this the part where you do that thing where you somehow think you matter less than other people?" he said. "Because I have to tell you that is a serious turn-off."
"Look, Bruce has a better understanding than any of us about the peculiarities of the energy fields down here," Natasha argued.
"No, no, I'm with Tony," Clint volunteered. "This mission is going to be hard enough without dragging along deadweight."
"Deadweight?" Tony demanded, his voice rising dangerously.
"I trust Bruce with my life," Thor said stoutly. "I would not turn him away from battle now."
"All right, guys, enough arguing. As leader of the team, this is my call to make," Steve said. He took a deep breath, then exhaled. "Okay. Okay. Bruce, I have absolutely the highest regard for you, but we can't carry out this mission and guarantee your safety at the same time. If the Hulk isn't available, then escorting you would just slow us down. We're going to take you back to the edge of town, and you'll wait in the Quinjet until we return."
"Thank you," Tony said, sarcasm only barely covering up the underlying gratitude.
"I understand," Bruce said, and pushed down a twinge of disappointed hurt. Of course, he recognized the truth in everything Steve had said - and Clint, and even Tony. Logically he knew it was the right choice. But logic couldn't silence the little voice that whispered deep in his mind, see how quickly they get rid of you when they can no longer use you. When you can no longer give them him.
~tbc...
