achluophobia
(fear of darkness)
He was in the dark, and the dark raged.
Searing images surrounded him, black on deeper black. The darkness surged and roared like a stormy sea, buffeting him in place with screaming silent voices and soundless visions.
There was a plain covered with corpses, mangled and grotesque beyond recognition, too battered to even tell what realm they had hailed from. There must have been a great battle here, and Thor knew he should rise, take up Mjolnir and fight; what other reason would there be for him to be on a battlefield, but to fight?
He knew he must rise - but he could not, for his body would not obey him, and Mjolnir was not in his grasp. He tried to raise his hand to call to his hammer, to feel its sweet song of battle and destruction cascade through him - but he could not.
The darkness surrounded him, drowned him, crushed him with an unfathomable force. To move even the smallest muscle was as to strain against the weight of a mountain. He could not seem to breathe, and he was not sure why, for surely there had been no water below him to break his fall... his fall? Had he fallen?
Am I dead? He could not be - could not be. For the dead were supposed to feel no pain. He had seen enough dead to know. His mother, his brother...
In the blackness before his eyes he saw a vision of a longship, laden with flowers and goods - and a body, serene in repose. It was his mother's longship, the last vision he'd had of her before she departed this world. Flames licked up the side of the boat, roaring to new heights as they consumed the fuel of the funeral pyre.
But something was wrong. His mother's body screamed and writhed, twisting in the funeral bed as the flames greedily attacked her flesh. This was wrong - this could not be - Thor had to rise, to go to her, to extinguish the flames and pull her free. But he could not. All he could do was watch helplessly, his voice flat and dead on his lips as he watched his mother burn.
Thunder sounded in his ears; the thunder turned to hoofbeats, and at the limits of his vision Thor saw a mounted figure as tall as a hill gallop by him across the sky. He knew the shape of his father's helmet, horned and winged, sharp and black as skyscrapers against the horizon, and the eight-legged silhouette of his father's mount Sleipnir. Together they thundered across the land, and dragged behind them a cloak of darkness that choked and stifled all that fell beneath it. All stilled, all silent; nothing left alive.
Ghostly walls seemed to waver up around him, shadows cast by shadows. Dimly, muzzily, Thor thought he recognized the streets and houses of the little human village above, seething with mist. Through the swirling fog stepped a familiar-looking silhouette: tall, gaunt, with cruel peaked horns jutting from his helmet and a dark cape sweeping behind.
The shadow of his brother walked slowly through the ghostly town, neck bent and face trained downwards, as though looking for something. At length he stopped, squatting before a pool of deeper shadow, and Thor was seized with a sudden terror of foreboding as he extended a hand towards it. He would have shouted, screamed a warning to his brother, but his tongue would not unstuck from his teeth and he could not breathe.
And then it was too late. The moment Loki's gloved fingers touched the surface of the pool, a vast wave of darkness rolled from it and enveloped him, sucking him in. All sign of him - horns, houses, streets and all - faded into the shadows.
A flicker in the darkness, and a small figure approached out of the corner of his eye. This figure, alone of all the phantasms, was marked with a splash of color - the white skin of his face, the green of his tunic, the frightened glint of his eyes. Thor knew him. It was Loki, but not Loki as Thor had last seen him - gaunt and hardened, prideful and maddened. This was the Loki that had been the companion of his childhood, the brother of his heart. His pale face was streaked with tears; he was not crying now, but he had been crying much recently.
This should not be. Thor longed to rise, to go to his brother and comfort him, shield him from the horrors of this place. But he could not. However much he strained to stand, to walk, to even raise one hand, he could only manage the merest twitch of his fingers.
"Please don't die," Loki said, and his voice was ragged as he reached out to touch Thor's shoulder. He was too numb to feel the contact. "Please, please be okay - I'm all alone and I'm scared -"
His brother was in trouble. His brother was scared. His brother needed him; his friends needed him. This world needed him. Thor knew he must rise, take up Mjolnir, and fight.
He must rise.
He must fight.
He must rise -
...but he could not.
Back during the War, Steve had spent some time on U-boats. There had been a lot of HYDRA bases throughout Europe to bust up, after all, and Howard Stark couldn't always steal a plane to sneak him over hundreds of miles inland. So he'd ended up on a submarine instead, sneaking around the blockade to drop him off on occupied beaches in the dead of night.
He'd never been part of the crew; he'd only been supercargo (in more than one sense of the word,) and never had more than the most basic safety training. But not being part of the duty roster only meant that he had more than enough time sitting idle while the crewmembers went about their duties, time in which to really feel the immense pressure of the ocean settling in around them, pressing the metal walls of the sub tightly and compressing the air inside.
There were no windows on a submarine, so he couldn't see the vast depths of the ocean surrounding them, but he'd known they were there all the same - those boundless, uncharted depths of an alien universe, all light and warmth and air lost measureless miles above. And except when the sky had come crashing down with him in it to bury the Red Skull's missiles in a watery grave - except when the walls of the airplane had crumpled like tin and the icy water had come gushing in and filling up the floor - he'd never felt that vast unknowing pressure again.
Not till now.
It was too dark to see much, the only light coming from the dim and sullen embers of the burning mock-city high up above, but Steve had the impression of a vast and boundless darkness stretching off in every direction. It didn't make sense - they were under the earth, and he'd seen and felt the stone walls closing about them the further down in that cavernous pit they travelled - but then again, what about this journey had made sense?
The ground, when they finally set their boots upon it, was thick and treacherous sand interspersed with jagged formation of rocks. Steve could barely make out looming silhouettes of darkness in the distance, but whether they were more rocky formations or even fields of some kind of dark foliage he could not say. More than anything else he felt like he was back on that submarine, a tiny sealed pod of the surface world diving deep into an alien environment that tried with every moment, ceaseless and uncaring, to crush them.
There was no actual water down here - they were breathing easy enough - but the air felt thick and stinking and stifling, and every step and every motion seemed to take a huge labor. Or maybe that was the snake-girl's poison after all, still burning through his veins even hours later. On one hand Steve supposed it was a good sign, that his super-soldier metabolism was still resisting the effects of that poison. On the other hand, ever since he'd changed he'd never met a poison or drug that he couldn't burn out of his system in minutes. It scared the hell out of him to think that there was one strong enough to linger for hours, and what if it was getting worse instead of better?
Those weren't things that he could afford to think about right now, and Steve pushed them firmly away. They still had - he still had - a job to do down here, and the first thing they had to do was find their friends.
Once their boots were on the ground, the first thing Steve did was to open one of his sealed pockets and crack out one of his flares. They were higher-tech than the magnesium flares he'd used back during the War - safer, longer-lasting, the light steadier and less blinding - but light was light, and it was hard to improve on the classics.
The ghostly-pale light cast harsh black shadows in every direction, and a sudden flurry of movement around the edges; Steve caught sight of a black skittering thing, the size of a dinner plate, burrowing quickly into the sand. "Everyone, what's your status?" Steve called out.
"Uhmm... I'm okay?" Bruce hazarded. He always had trouble with combat signals, given that he was not usually around for the combat that required them. Steve looked him over - he seemed to be fine, if exhausted, pushing himself clumsily to his feet and shoving his glasses back on his face - and gave him a nod.
"Clear," Natasha said curtly, and moved out to the edge of the ring of light in order to take up a guard stance there, gazing watchfully out into the darkness. It occurred to Steve that maybe he shouldn't have lit the flare, maybe he should have kept their eyes dark-adapted. But then Bruce wouldn't have been able to see at all, and he needed to be able to see his team's condition.
"Clear," Clint responded, but there was an edge to his voice that said otherwise, Steve turned the light towards him. Clint looked the same as he had - tired, grimy, streaked with blood all down one side and his leg - but he turned out his quiver to display the problem. "I'm almost out of ammo, Cap."
Without a word Natasha reached into her boot and pulled out a long, slim pistol that glistened black in the cold light. She unclipped a row of cartridges from her belt and handed both of them over to Clint, who took them with a word of quiet thanks. She was low on ammunition too, Steve thought; he knew she had to be. Yet she divided her resources without a second thought, so that her teammates would not have to go unarmed.
When she straightened up again something caught at her movement, usually so fluid, and Steve caught the barest hint of a wince on her face. When she moved again, though she tried to hide it, Steve saw; the barest hint of a limp in her stride. Steve moved forward, catching her shoulder. "Widow, you're limping. You've been hit?"
She glanced up at him, then shrugged and looked away. "It's nothing."
"What happened?"
"It's nothing," she repeated with an edge to her voice. "I can keep going."
"I didn't ask if you could keep going, I asked what happened," Steve said, letting steel creep into his own tone.
Natasha held his gaze for a moment more, then broke it with a sigh. "That time when the gravity went on and we took a bad tumble. You were going over the edge and I had to brace you." She shrugged again, resigned to the vagaries of luck. "The mass ratio wasn't in my favor."
Steve sucked in his breath. He remembered the fall she meant, dangling over a heart-stopping pit with Natasha flat on the rock above him. "... so this is my fault," he muttered. "If I hadn't been so clumsy..."
"It wasn't your fault, Steve," Natasha assured him. "I made a call and it was the right one. Flogging yourself over it isn't going to fix my leg, so don't waste your time on it."
Steve sighed. She was right, and he knew it. He could at least push the guilt away, even if he couldn't ever fully banish it. "Is there anything that would help?"
"Lots of things," Natasha said dryly. "But none of them are down here and none of them that any of you can do, so like I said. Don't worry about it. As long as I don't have to do thirty-two fouettés on this leg, I'll be fine."
Steve made himself smile and nod, but privately he wasn't so sure. Clint had been hurt too and was limping along well enough, but Clint's long-range style didn't depend on fast footwork. Natasha's did, she had to get in close, and if she couldn't get away fast enough because her ankle gave out on her...
He'd make sure that wouldn't happen. He'd keep an eye on her - on them all - and get them through. "You hang tight, soldier," he said, clasping her shoulder again. "I'll get you home."
"Well, we're down," Clint observed unnecessarily. "Which way are we heading now, boss?"
Steve looked over at Bruce. "You've been our guide so far. Any ideas?" he asked.
Bruce shook head, greying hair curling and sticking to his forehead. "On the up side, at least the needle has stopped pointing, uh, down," he said. "So whatever it is that's at the end of it, we're at least on the right level."
"That is good to know... I think," Natasha said.
Bruce swallowed visibly. "The down side is, this gives us no idea where to find Tony and Thor," he said in an almost-whisper.
"That's got to be our first priority," Steve decided. "They can't be too far. We might not have travelled straight down from our initial position, but we can't have gone too far off track. Let's start a search pattern, spiraling out from our starting location. We'll find them sooner or later."
"Or at least," Clint muttered, "we'll find where they landed."
"We'll find them," Steve said firmly. He strode forward, holding the flare high, towards the edge of the pool of sand they stood in. Black-leaved foliage rustled in a soundless wind, and Steve reached out to brush it aside and clear the way.
Steve was an experienced combat veteran, a super-soldier enhanced to the limit of human potential, and a superhero. He did not quite yelp and jump a foot in the air when he found himself inches away from a blank, staring face. But it was a near thing.
"Don't move!" Clint shouted, and Steve knew that he and Natasha had both drawn a bead on the... thing. That was enough to let him regain his bearings.
"It's not a threat," he said, swallowing; helowered his shield and stepped forward. "It's not... alive. I think... it looks like a statue."
Natasha glowered suspiciously. "Just because it's not alive, doesn't mean it's not a threat," she muttered. "Not here."
"I'm pretty sure it's made of stone. Marble or..." Steve trailed off as he stepped forward, gloved hands brushing the black leaves away. The statue revealed was of a man - shorter than Steve, but clearly full-grown - standing posed mid-motion. The clothes were colorless, fused to his body, but unremarkable; the expression was blank and emotionless. It could have been anyone, any man on the street; the only thing unusual about the statue was the wide gaping gash where his throat should be.
Clint made a distrustful noise, edging to the side to get a more clear line of sight. "I'm with Tasha," he said. "Should we take it apart, Cap? Stone or no, it can't be that hard."
Steve hesitated for a moment, glancing from their suspicious faces to Bruce's... also wary, but in a different way. "I think... we're not here to pick fights," he said, taking a careful step back from the stone statue. "Let's... let's work on finding our friends."
Clint looked wildly dubious, and Natasha looked like it physically caused her pain to leave a possible threat standing behind her, but they obeyed. Still, the two of them didn't drop their weapons as they edged past the statue and moved on.
The Avengers moved out in a wide spiral from their starting point; not overlapping their own trail, but keeping within sight of it so as not to miss a yard of ground. Steve shone the light ahead of them, Clint and Natasha watchfully guarded his flanks, and Bruce trailed behind, searching the ground for any clues.
They passed more of the eerie stone statues on their path, all of them frozen standing in place. All of them bore obvious and grisly signs of violence, perfectly and horribly carven into the stone. Here a man with a hole through his eye socket that they could see right through to the back; there a woman with a gunshot wound through the head, the entry wound tiny on the right and wide and gaping on the left. Here a man with his chest blown out from the inside, ribs burst outward like an overripe fruit. There a twisted, charred figure whose gender they could not guess, so blackened and scorched from some terrible fire.
Steve had seen a lot of violence in his life, had seen a lot of men die in ugly ways. That still didn't make it pleasant to see the gruesome imagery of death captured in such silent, eerie freeze-frame, but that wasn't what bothered him about those statues. No, what bothered him was how... creepingly familiar some of the death-wounds seemed. Here, a man with his skull crushed and caved in, and Steve could almost see the shape and the force of the blow that would have done it...
Just when he was on the verge of some gut-churning understanding, Steve's hearing caught the faintest hint of sound from ahead of them. In an instant every sense was on alert, straining forward into the gloom.
"Hey," someone was calling, weak and faint from the darkness ahead, "hey, guys. Guys. Is that you? Are you there?"
He knew that voice - one of the voices he'd been waiting for. All concern vanished in an overwhelming rush of relief, and Steve barely kept himself from shouting jubilantly in return, rushing forward heedless of caution. Behind him, Bruce let out a gutteral groan and started to do just that, until Steve caught him with an arm across his chest.
"Don't lose your head," he warned lowly, "not now, not when we've come this far. It's probably him, he's probably fine, but just in case... just in case, let me go first, hey?"
"Then you'd better get moving, Rogers," Bruce growled, and there was a hint of the Hulk's snarl on his face as he did. "I'm not going to wait much longer."
A little shaken despite himself, Steve moved forward towards the voice. "Tony?" he called back, still keeping his voice soft in the heavy darkness.
"Yeah!" The voice was a little stronger now, and Steve could make out the direction; he set off at a quick jog, shield held before him, feeling his way carefully over the rough jagged stone. "Cap, is that you? I'm here! Over here!"
He was half-expecting the familiar silhouette of Iron Man to come jetting through the fog on his repulsors, or at least come clanking over the ridge. Instead, as Steve reached the top of the rise and shone his light down the other side, the light fell on the darkened shape of Tony Stark lying on his back on the ground.
"Hey, could one of you guys come give me a hand here?" Tony called out and his voice was weak, still too weak for the brash, boisterous Tony he knew. "I can't... I can't move my legs."
As soon as those words were uttered Steve found himself shoved violently aside, and Bruce ran stumbling the last dozen yards across the rough terrain, and fell to his knees with a painful crack beside Tony.
What passed between them next was not for anyone else to share, and although Steve turned his eyes away - staring intently into the darkness around them, searching for any hint of movement - he could not close his ears. "Hey," he heard Tony say, just a little bit louder. "Hey, big guy, I'm okay. I'm just stuck, that's all. Just a little stuck."
Bruce's returning murmur was too soft for Steve to make out, but Tony's response was clear. "No, it's not, it's fine. I can feel my feet, I can wiggle my toes just fine. The armor's broke, that's all, and I'm pinned under it. My spine is just fine."
Bruce sat back shakily, readjusting his glasses on his face. "I'll be the judge of that," he said sternly, and set to work dismantling Tony's suit with the manual catches.
With clinical precision he reached into the open carapace of Tony's armor and put his hands around Tony's neck, feeling the alignment of the neck vertebrae. He moved carefully down the other man's back, one hand on his chest to hold him flat and ignoring Tony's hisses and grumbles of pain as he checked every bone of the spine.
Only once he was done and found no breakages did Bruce seem to sag in relief, slumping over Tony's prone form. "I don't know how you do it, Tony," he groaned. "Someone must look after fools, madmen and drunkards."
"Yeah, well, I'm three for three," Tony said. "Can you help - help get me out of the legs? The servos are busted, and -" he tried to shift position, then gave up in a grunt of pain. "-so's my shoulder, I think. I can't reach the manual catches from here."
It took the work of three Avengers combined to peel Tony out of the shattered hull of his suit. Tony's work had been well-designed - the suit had, thankfully, taken the bulk of the impact and protected Tony's flesh from becoming a wet smear on the ground (aside from a truckful of bruises and sprains and one badly broken shoulder.) But the sacrifice had been thorough. Only a few isolated circuits on the suit sputtered with life; the rest of it was dead weight fractured into a dozen pieces with the power conduits severed. Fragments of the backplate were scattered around like broken eggshells, both legs and one arm were powerless and unresponsive. The helmet with its built-in computer system and scanners was blackened and dead, so Tony could not wear it with the faceplate down even for the modicum of protection it would provide.
It wasn't just the dead weight of the suit that had pinned Tony's legs in place, Steve realized as they reached them; they were bound up with thick, waxy black thread. It took him a moment to recognize it, and then a chill broke out on his back and traveled down to his sides as he remembered the sight of the spiders vanishing beneath the sand. They had Tony halfway to cocooned before they'd found him. God only knew what would have become of him if they hadn't come when they did, lying alone in the dark and unable to move, helpless to defend himself...
It always surprised Steve a little bit how much smaller Tony looked out of the suit; especially now, with his black undershirt hanging off in ragged tatters and his hair slicked down to his skull with sweat. Natasha and Bruce worked together, quietly and efficiently, to bandage up the gashes on Tony's back and bind his broken shoulder in place. With his right arm fixed securely across his chest and his arm and shoulder swathed in white bandages, he looked more vulnerable than Steve had ever seen him.
He almost hated to ask. "Iron Man," he said, "we're walking blind down here. I need you to give me the best report you can about what we can expect to encounter, the further we go."
Tony grimaced. "Sorry, Cap, no can do," he said. "And I mean it. That's not just me being difficult. My sensors were knocked out and I couldn't raise my faceplate to see out. I haven't seen a damn thing down here. I heard..." He trailed off, a troubled expression on his face. "Well. I honestly couldn't put a name to most of the things I heard. Sorry."
Steve frowned, but nodded. "We still need to find Thor, before we do anything else," he said. "Can you walk? We'll fall back into the search pattern, unless you have some idea of where we should go."
Tony's face turned grim. "Oh, I have an idea," he said. "But you're not going to like it."
"You know where Thor is?" Clint spoke up. "That's great, that's great news! Which way did he go?"
Tony raised his left arm - still in its gauntlet, the only part of the suit left even remotely functional. "That way," he said. "Just follow the spiders."
The going got harder the further they went, the ground increasingly uneven and broken. They had to push themselves to stagger up steep ridges and then down the other side, gingerly stepping among the loose rock scree and trying not to lose their footing and take a sharp and wild careen into the ditch. The rocks were broken and sharp-edged, and no matter how careful and steady Steve tried to hold the light, it still cast deep and treacherous shadows over small pits and other hazards.
They passed more of the statues as they went, and it seemed to Steve that each one was larger and more ominous than the last. The figured they depicted were larger than life, too big to be human, with lines and scabs defacing stone skin bared to the elements and twisted, sneering faces. Like the others, they too all bore marks of tremendous violence - crushed skulls, caved-in ribcages, headless necks, limbs snapped off at the elbow or knee. Steve tried not to look too closely at any of the statues, nor at any of the jumbled stone fragments littering the ground that might have suggested the shapes of feet or hands or faces.
Steve heard Thor before he saw him, a sonorous rumble of inhale and exhale that tickled faintly against Steve's ear. He raised their light higher and squinted into the dimness, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. "Thor? Can you hear me, buddy?" he called out, and got no response.
There was something... off about the sound; Steve knew what Thor's breathing sounded like, both when he was calm and in the heat of battle, or even when he had fallen asleep on the sofa and let out snores that rattled the windowpanes. This was different than that, this was a sound like a bear wheezing in a damp winter cave, cold and wet and labored.
Steve scrambled to the top of another ridge and the circle of the light spread out before him, and the very edge of it lapped against a shape that made Steve's heart lift in its chest. "Thor!" he called out, and started forward. "Thor, it's us, we're here!" The darkened silhouette might have shifted slightly, and Steve heard the faintest sound of a groan in answer, but nothing more, nor did he move to join them.
At first Steve thought that Thor was crouched on the ground, doubled over on his hands and knees, his hair hanging down in a sheet to cover his face. He wondered why Thor stayed in that position, why he did not stand up or even turn to greet his friends and teammates. Then the circle of illumination moved up as Steve did, lighting on Thor's hands... and he realized that the God of Thunder's hands were dangling a good six inches above the stone.
"I heard him," Tony said quietly, his voice laced with sorrow and a deep-laced shame. I heard when he landed, and a few times after, when he called out... when he still could. But I couldn't move, couldn't go to him."
"Oh, Jesus." Steve almost dropped the flare - almost wanted to, for what it revealed - and the cold light wavered in his shaking hands as he held it higher, revealing the ruin that had become of the God of Thunder.
When they'd found Tony alive and conscious (if not entirely safe,) Steve had allowed himself to hope for the best. Thor had always been - apart from the Hulk - the toughest one on the team, able to take more punishment than the rest of the team combined and still laugh it off. A part of Steve had been subconsciously convinced all along that no matter what happened, Thor would be all right.
He'd been wrong.
Tony had been incredibly lucky - that his armor had been able to take the brutal force of the landing, that his landing site had been relatively clear. Thor hadn't been so lucky. He'd come crashing down like a falling star, and impaled himself on the jagged spike of a stone spire that jutted upwards from the rocky floor. It went straight through him, punctured from front to back, right through his chest to emerge a good half-yard of bloodied stone point above him. His head hung down, senseless, and his arms and hands dangled limply not quite brushing the stone floor below; all his weight rested on the unforgiving stone fixture that had skewered him. Blood glistened on the stone spire above him, painted the sides of the stone column beneath him, to puddle darkly on the ground, joined by a steady drizzle of blood that dripped from his slack lips.
And yet despite the horrific tableau, Thor yet lived. His heavy frame still trembled and stuttered with each labored, agonized breath, his dangling hands twitched as though still seeking to close upon Mjolnir's haft. God only knew how long he had been trapped here, fixated, but somehow his heart still labored onwards, his lungs still struggled to fill.
"He's lucky he fell face down," a voice remarked from behind Steve, and he turned quickly to see Bruce standing there, his arms folded tight against his chest. His voice was offhand, casual, but it was only a thin veneer of unconcern stretched across a deep distress and dismay. A doctor's calm professionalism, a shield to hold against all the horrors that could befall a living body. "If he'd landed face-up, he would have drowned in his own blood long ago."
"We need to get him off that rock," Natasha muttered.
"It might - that might kill him," Cling objected, his voice cracked and wavering. " 'S rule one of trauma aid - if there's a foreign object in the wound, do not remove it, secure and transport..."
"Yeah, but transport to where?" Tony shot back, leaning heavily against a protruding outcrop of rock. "You're right. It might kill him. But he should have been dead over an hour ago - if he's survived this far, God only knows what else he can survive."
"And besides," Natasha added. "What's the alternative - just leaving him there?"
Clint had no answer to this, so they moved forward as a team. The stone formation that had Thor trapped was slick and slippery in some places with his blood, and Steve had to place his boots carefully to be sure he had sturdy footing. The ground beneath his feet, beneath his hands, was lumpy in twisted in ways he didn't want to look at too carefully - here and there his light wavered across features that looked unnervingly like a leering face, a grasping hand. He did his best to ignore them, averting his eyes until he had climbed up the stone protrusion to Thor's side.
"Thor," he said, quieter now, reaching out to grip his friend's limp arm, "we're here. Can you hear us? We're going to get you down from here. It's," he said, swallowing a lump in his throat, "it's going to be okay."
Thor didn't react, apart from a reflexive twitch when Steve first made contact. Stooping down Steve could see that his blue eyes were open, but hazy and unfocused, without a trace of awareness in them. Red-stained teeth peeked out from between slack lips, and blood dripped in a slow tempo from his mouth. Steve gripped him a little harder, then pulled back his hand.
"You're going to have to provide most of the lift, Cap," Natasha said, and Steve looked over at her. She indicated herself and the other three: Tony without his powered armor, Bruce without the Hulk's strength, herself and Clint, only mortals and already injured. "You know how heavy he is. We'll try to guide him once you've gotten him off the rock, but the power will have to come from you."
Steve nodded, already bracing himself for the unpleasantness that was about to come. He didn't shy away from hard work or hard tasks, but the poison was already weakening him, and Thor was not just heavy - he was damnheavy. With all his armor on he was closer to half a ton, approaching the upper bound of Steve's strength even at his best. Now, to lift him high enough to be free of the cruel stone spike, and hold him there while the others maneuvered and guided him... well, he wasn't sure he had that much power and precision in him.
He had to, though. He was the only chance Thor had. "Let's do it," he said.
It took a few minutes more to plan their attack, to fan out around their stricken friend and find the best places to brace and grip and guide. Bruce stood back on one side, Tony on the other, in order to provide oversight and direction. Steve stooped down, shuffling his feet to try to get firm footing on the crumbled and uneven ground, and braced himself with his shoulders beneath Thor's collarbone, reaching out to take the best hold he could on Thor's hips.
"All right, steady as you can," Bruce's voice came from the other side. "Now - lift..."
Steve pushed. His neck and shoulders met the unyielding ceiling of Thor's body, and for a straining moment he wasn't sure he could do this at all. Bench-pressing weights in the Avengers' training room was nothing like this, it was skewed and awkward and he couldn't get under Thor's center of mass to apply force like he needed to. The effort made his heart strain, made spots swim in front of his eyes, and the dizziness that had come and gone in waves over the last hour threatened to overwhelm him.
No. His teammate's life was on the line here, they needed him. Steve Rogers wasn't going to let a friend down, not again. He exhaled carefully and shifted his grip, his angle, and surged upwards again - and this time, accompanied by a horrifically wet sucking noise, Thor's body began to rise.
For a moment the light shone through Thor's body, rays of it striking clear through the hole in his chest and glancing off the glistening surface of viscera, the exposed wet whiteness of bone. Then the vision was obscured as blood began to well in the wound, a swiftly-rising tide of gore.
In the next heartbeat a gush of hot blood surged out of the wound in Thor's chest, splashing over Steve's shoulder and chest. Some of it splashed into his mouth, and Steve shook his head and spat best he could to clear it. He kept on grimly pushing upwards, ignoring the terrifying waterfall of blood, until he heard Tony call out that they were clear of the rock.
Natasha and Clint's hands were on Thor, pushing and pulling, and Steve shuffled clindly to the side along with their direction. At last he was able to shift his grip, getting one hand wrapped around Thor's thick-muscled torso and balance the center of his abdomen on his shoulder. They staggered a few steps to some marginally flatter, clearer section of rock, and then began to gently let Thor down again.
"No, not on his back!" Bruce said sharply, and Steve and the two assassins switched courses at the last moment, instead laying Thor carefully down on his side. Bruce stepped up to stand at Steve's shoulder, his eyes shining with concern. "If there's blood coming from his mouth, his airways have been compromised. There needs to be a path for the fluid to drain, or he'll drown in it."
As Thor's body touched the ground, he let out a wet, burbling moan. As if in response, the loose gravel and shale began to shift and rattle, churning as frenetically as a localized earthquake. Glints of shining, patent-leather black appeared in the cracks, followed by long spindly legs that ended in gleaming silver needles. Five, ten... a dozen or more of them skittered across the ground, making for their helpless teammate.
"Get the fuck away from him!" Tony bellowed, and followed that up with a blast from his remaining repulsor-gauntlet. It was too weak to do more than blast one or two away, the rest of them scuttling from the heat and light... but within a few moments they were back again, making for Thor with animal single-mindedness.
"Let them alone!" Bruce said, and the authority in his tone made Clint and Natasha hesitate with their weapons leveled - or maybe they just feared they would hit Thor, if they fired so close. "Let them do their work."
"Are you insane?" Tony demanded. "We didn't go to the trouble of getting him down just so he could be eaten by spiders!"
"They aren't going to eat him," Bruce said. "They didn't eat you, and they could have, while you were down. I think... I think they're trying to help."
That got all of their attention, giving the doctor looks between confused and outraged. "Help?" Clint choked out.
Bruce pulled aside his tattered sleeve, and displayed a long black seam on the side of his arm - a wound, Steve realized after a moment's inspection, that had been sutured closed. "I got this cut on my arm earlier," he explained. "When one of the spiders... got on me, it did this. It hasn't bled a drop since then. I think... I think they're attracted to loud noises like screams or moans, because they're instinctively driven to do this - to get on wounds and seal them up, like this."
A shudder of revulsion went up Steve's spine at the thought, and he wasn't the only one, judging by how Clint flinched away. "So these are some kind of - of first-aid spiders?" he choked out. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather just wait for the doc."
"Except that I can't help him with a wound this size," Bruce bit off savagely. "I don't have anything like the equipment I would need - or even the surgical expertise. I can do surface first aid, but he's hemorrhaging from a gaping wound in his abdomen. At least one of his lungs is punctured, probably both, and I have no idea how his heart is even still going. We don't have any heat source strong enough to cauterize a wound of this size, even if the shock and additional trauma of that didn't kill him outright. If these spiders can't help him, then I don't think anything can."
With that grim pronouncement ringing in their ears, they reluctantly backed away, letting the red spiders swarm their fallen teammate. Thor cried out as the sharp metal mandibles built into his flesh, and Steve's fingers whitened bloodlessly on his forearms as he struggled not to intervene.
But the thick river of red flowing out from under Thor's body lessened, then slowed to a trickle. The spiders peeled off of Thor, scuttling away into the shadows again, and they could see that the grievous wound had been... plugged, was the best Steve could say. At the least, Thor was no longer bleeding out on the rock, but the dark mass of glistening silken threads that plugged the wound did not look anything like wholesome or healthy.
"You know we can't take him with us," Natasha said quietly. She didn't say it as a challenge, or an accusation; it was the simple statement of fact.
Steve nodded slowly, acknowledging the fact even as his heart rebelled against it. But there was no possible way they could carry Thor's dead weight, not over the sort of terrain they still had to travel. Nor any way they could protect him and still fight against whatever they would find at the end. "Then someone is going to have to stay with him," he said aloud.
Natasha gave him a sharp look. "We shouldn't split up the team, Cap," she said. "That's - that's what our enemy wants. Divide and conquer."
"I could stay with him," Bruce volunteered.
"No, you won't," Tony snapped reflexively. Bruce laid a calming hand on his arm, and they shared a long look.
Bruce continued as he took his hand away. "I'm not going to be much use in a fight no matter what," he said with a small self-deprecating smile. "And of all of us, I'm the best suited to keep an eye on Thor and monitor his condition. If he takes a turn for the worse... well, honestly, there's still probably not much I can do. But I'll do what I can."
Steve gave Bruce a long look, then sighed and looked away. He didn't like any of this, but the man's logic did make sense. "All right," he said. "But I don't want you to be defenseless. Has anybody got another spare gun?" He turned to the rest of his team, who exchanged wordless glances.
After a long moment, Natasha walked over to Bruce and flipped her gun around in her hand, extending the grip of it towards Bruce. "Here," she said. "It's got twelve shots left in it. If you end up needing more than that, I don't think you would get the chance to use them."
Steve frowned. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Isn't that your last sidearm?"
"I've still got my knives," Natasha replied, drawing one from her boot to show him, "and my Widow's Bite. It's better for Hawkeye to keep the last gun in our party; his eyesight and aim are better than mine. Don't haggle, Cap."
Steve submitted without further argument, uneasiness gnawing in his stomach as he looked over his team - both halves of his team. So few weapons, to take looking for a fight. So few defenses, to leave behind to guard the injured. But Natasha was right. They could only do the best they could with what they had. Maybe it would have made more sense to concentrate all their firepower - but he wouldn't leave Bruce and Thor undefended. He couldn't do that.
He walked over to where Thor was lying, every breath rattling and gurgling through his big frame. Steve knelt down by Thor's head, reaching out to carefully touch the side of his neck - the only part of him that was not smeared with blood. "Thor," he called out softly. "We're going to have to leave for a while, to get to the bottom of this. Bruce is gonna stay and keep an eye on you. But we'll come back for you both, buddy, that's a promise."
Thor's blue eyes flicked open, still cloudy with pain and fugue. Steve leaned forward, and Thor's eyes slid slowly into focus on him. Thor's muscles seized and twitched with an effort, his hand jerking a few inches towards Steve before falling nerveless again. "Kuh," he wheezed out, his voice painful and bloody. "Cah... tenn..."
"I'm here," Steve said, reaching to seize his hand and squeeze it. "It's gonna be all right, Thor. It'll be okay."
Thor's lips moved; more blood dribbled out between them. It was painfully obvious that every effort to speak just forced more blood into his airway, drowning his words before they found their way free. "I... sssssaw," he managed, through bubbles of blood. "Muh... buh... burah... -boy. Little... boy. Puh... puhleeeze..."
Steve's brows knitted together, as he fought through the messy ruin of Thor's voice to grasp the message he was trying to get out. "You saw someone? A kid?" he asked, for clarity.
Thor's head dropped a few centimeters, a weak nod. "Puleeze... puh... puh... protekk... him. I cuh... cant. Puleeze..."
"I will, Thor." Steve squeezed his hand harder. He had no idea what Thor was talking about, who or what he could possibly have seen in this dark place, as close to death as he had been. But he would try. Whatever it is that Thor wanted of him, he would try. And if there ally was some poor kid down here, lost in this nightmare, Steve would protect him with his life.
Thor's eyes closed, and he sagged bonelessly against the stone. Steve cautiously opened his hand to set Thor's arm back on the ground, and stood. He glanced up to see Clint watching him, a speculative frown on his face.
"What's on your mind, Hawkeye?" Steve asked.
Clint opened his mouth, then slowly shut it. He swallowed hard, looking at the bloodied ruin that was Thor, and then looked back up at Steve with a determined air. "My mind is thinkin' that we don't have enough firepower for this mission, sir."
Steve grimaced. "You'll get no argument from me there. But there's no resupply depots down here, so we'll have to do our best with what we have."
"My mind is also thinking," Clint went on determinedly, "that we need to use all the resources that we have. That we can't afford to leave a powerful weapon on the table, even if its wielder is down for the count." He glanced significantly in the direction of the fallen Thor.
He understood. "You're talking about Mjolnir?"
"Thor's hammer. Yeah."
Steve frowned. There was nothing shameful about sharing weapons in a pinch, but Thor's weapon wasn't just a tool - it was an extension of his powers, a part of himself. It felt wrong to take it from him, even for a good cause, while he was too out of it to give consent. He had never offered to so much as let any of the rest of the team touch it, before. In fact... "Isn't it enchanted? So that nobody else but Thor can lift it?" he asked.
Clint and Natasha exchanged glances. "Not exactly," the redhead replied.
"Supposedly, it's enchanted so that only the worthy can lift it," Bruce filled in helpfully.
"Freaking magic," Tony muttered in the background. "Arbitrary undefined subjective user conditions..."
"That's why we're pretty sure you're our best bet, Cap," Clint added, and Steve blinked.
"Me? Why me?"
"Because, let's face it, none of the rest of us ring up all that high on the personal virtue-o-meter," Clint said bluntly. "I mean... Nat and I... we don't exactly have the cleanest of pasts..."
Natasha stayed quiet, but she raised her chin in just a fraction of a nod, her eyes glittering in the cold light.
"I've actually tried to lift it before - or at least, the Other Guy did - so I know I'm off the table in this debate," Bruce said with a deprecating half-smile.
"But you, Iron Man -" Steve began, but Tony interrupted him with a grimace and a wave.
"Let's not get into the whole sordid story, okay?" Tony said. "I don't really feel like reliving the entire litany of arms-dealing, substance abuse, and general assholishness to my loved ones. Let's just take it as read that of all of us here, you're the one with the best chance of passing the 'worthy' test. If you can't, we definitely can't."
And if I can't? Steve wondered. Still - they had to try.
A few minutes more of searching turned up Mjolnir, half-embedded into the stone with a crater blown around it. It wasn't actually far - Steve would bet that Thor had still had it in hand when he landed, before the impact and injury tore his grip loose.
Steve took a deep breath, reached down, and wrapped his hand around the shortened handle. He gave it a tentative tug.
Nothing happened. The hammer did not budge.
A sinking coldness struck Steve right behind the breastbone, the same feeling he'd gotten a hundred times when a pretty girl had snubbed him, times a thousand. The one that made him feel about three feet tall. Humiliation, shame, insignificance, and now something even darker - fear.
Did you really think for a minute that you could do this, Steve Rogers? a sinister whisper seemed to sneer at him, specter of a thousand nights of deaths and regrets. Did you really think yourself worthy to sit among gods and heroes? You're just a skinny worthless Brooklyn street rat on the inside, and even if the rest of them don't know it, you always will.
He forced his hand to open, his arm to lift away from the weapon, and forced a grin onto his face. "Well, it was worth a try," he said lightheartedly.
They all looked back at him, struggling to cover up expressions of disappointment with sympathy - but Steve saw it, all the same. He'd let them down. He'd let them all down. They'd been counting on him, and he hadn't come through. They'd have no super-weapon to back them up now, no god-powers to help them.
As he walked away from the hammer, straight-backed, chin high, he felt more vulnerable than ever.
~tbc...
