Steve feels more than hears the director come to a stop beside him, and they watch in silence as Agent Coulson's bed is wheeled in and secured next to where the now-awake Agent Romanoff's head is being examined.
"What's the word, Director?" he eventually asks, glancing over.
Fury exhales heavily. "Thor's keeping the Hulk busy in Hangar 3, Loki's working on some spell to revert the Hulk back into Banner, and Stark's holed up in his room, working on fixing his suit."
"And your missing agent?" Steve asks.
"Right there," Fury says, nodding to the man whose bed is being brought into a separate room. "We found him next to Coulson. From what Coulson managed to tell me, Agent Romanoff was able to inform him about how to stop the mind-control, but she wasn't fast enough to do it herself." He gestures to the irate-looking dame in question. "Coulson was lucky enough to knock Barton out, but got a knife to the leg before he could stop Thanos from escaping. He says his host chanted something to disappear, probably some sort of teleportation spell."
Steve feels alarm course through him, and he turns his head to face the other man. "How do we know she isn't still on board?"
"We used thermal sensors to scan every inch of this place," Fury tells him. "Every heat signature has been accounted for. He's gone."
"And he took Thor's descendant too," Steve sighs. "The poor guy's gonna be pissed. Does he know?"
Fury hedges. "We were hoping to tell him right before we leave for Stark Tower, but first, we need to confirm the Cube's location." And they couldn't do that while Barton was still out-cold.
"Let me know when he wakes up," Steve requests, uncrossing his arms and stepping away from the glass wall. "I need to talk to Stark."
"About what?"
Steve hesitates, weighing the benefits of sharing the problem with a man who was technically his superior. "Stark and I are part of a team now. We need to settle our differences if we want the team to work out the way it's intended to," he eventually says, though a little guilt seeps into him as he decides to keep the entire truth to himself for now.
"Really?" Fury asks skeptically. "Why the sudden change of heart? You've been pretty aggressive towards him this entire time."
Was he? Goodness, how awful had he been? "I just…" Steve tries to organize the words he wants to say. And when it comes out, he realizes why he was so upset with the man in the first place. "I realized he isn't Howard."
Fury nods understandingly. "Then you should probably go tell him that."
Steve quirks a smile at the director, then heads off in the direction of Stark's room. He's two corridors away when he hears the almost-faint sound of Fury giving out orders.
"Hill," the director attempts to relay quietly, but Steve's sharp ears still catch the back-stabbing, knife-twisting words, "I want audio up in Stark's room."
Swallowing back the pain of betrayal that lodges itself in his throat, Steve forces his body to keep moving, grateful that he'd at least been introduced to the concept of security cameras and knowing that every hallway in SHIELD's base had them.
Now he understood why Stark could barely stand to be in the same room with Fury and his other agents.
He'd noticed, of course. How could he not? Tony Stark was so different from Howard, who had been proud but approachable. Tony Stark was closed off and only had two people he pointedly preferred to associate with onboard—Loki and Dr. Banner. Steve thinks it's because they're different and very intelligent. He tolerated Agent Coulson too for some reason, and he didn't really dislike Thor, though Stark's feelings there were probably thanks to the confrontation they had earlier on. And of course, he disliked Steve too, but Steve freely admits that he played a large part in that because of his…well, aggressiveness, as Fury had pointed out earlier.
The irony there is that the reason Steve had been so pushy with Stark was because he'd been indignant on SHIELD's behalf.
Good Lord, but he was a fool. Now he has even more to apologize for.
But that would have to wait. Fury thinks that he's going to settle his differences with Stark, and Steve's willing to do just that.
After this whole invasion was over though, he and Stark were going to have a very extensive talk about a very specific director.
She's not dead. She's in severe pain, but she isn't dead, and with Thanos in control, there apparently wasn't a state of unconsciousness she could fall into. She's awake as the pain from the red blast seared a crater into her chest, awake when Thanos makes her body move as if it hadn't just been pounded into a wall like a crash test dummy, awake when Thanos chants something weird and her body is suddenly squeezed and stretched.
The view from her mother's New York office fills her eyesight, and she blinks dumbly at it for half a second. 'Holy fucking shit, did we just teleport?' she asks Thanos, her surprise briefly overcoming the pain squeezing at her chest.
"We did," Thanos replies, her body beginning a casual walk towards the balcony doors at his behest. The coolness factor of having actually teleported from point A to point B goes away almost immediately, and Anna curses him with every step he takes because it agitates the burns and bruises she got from Coulson's fucking gun. Thanos doesn't seem to feel the pain that accompanies each step—he just makes her body stroll as if it hadn't been blasted into a wall by a motherfucking cannon.
Asshole.
At least Clint was safe now, and he'd be with the Avengers when they came to stop the invasion. Anna swallows as she realizes she might not have changed much after all. With Thanos inside her, she couldn't stop the portal from opening and killing a portion of New York's population. She was supposed to stop that—stop all of this—from happening, but she'd failed. She—
"Please vacate the premises immediately." Anna feels her heart jump at the familiar voice, and her feet freeze mid-stride.
"Jarvis, I'm heading up to the party," she said while hooking an earring with her left hand and slipping her right shoe on with the other. "How long will it take you to upload yourself?"
"Thirty minutes, Miss Anna," Jarvis replied. "I trust you'll survive without me for that long?"
"Jarvis, was it?" Thanos muses, relying on her memories for information on her father's AI. "Initiate Stark Protocol one-one-twelve."
"No such protocol found," Jarvis responds smugly. "Please vacate the premises immediately, or I shall be obliged to use excessive force." To back up his statement, several wall panels opens to reveal mounted machine guns with attached laser-sights, the red beams of light pointing directly towards the already-damaged part of her chest.
At the unexpected danger, Thanos's fury leaks out into her body, sending adrenaline pumping through her veins. "What do you mean—?"
'1-1-12 is my birthday, dumbass,' Anna supplies, feeling just as smug as Jarvis sounds despite the threat to her life. 'The protocol doesn't exist because I don't exist.' Which also explains why she hadn't known about the machine guns hidden in the walls. Her mother must've had them taken down around the time she was born.
"Well, then," Thanos grits out with no small anger. "I shall…give in—" her nose wrinkles in distaste, "—to your demands, Jarvis."
With one more chant, they're suddenly outside, and the wind instantly sears into her wounds. Anna's breath catches in her throat when the first lash of air strikes the torn flesh and bared muscles, and even Thanos couldn't stop her body from shaking as he braces her body against the harsh push of wild air whipping around them.
"Who are you?" Startled, Anna feels her body turn to see who'd spoken, and beside them stood what looks like a reactor and an old man in a blue-checkered shirt. She racks her brain, but couldn't remember who the man is. He's familiar though, like she'd seen him only once and never got to know him.
"It's me, doc," her mouth says, and the 'doc' somehow realizes that it's Thanos talking to him. "Is it ready?"
"I'm just calibrating the start sequence before I activate the reactor," the old man says, half-yelling over the furious winds swiping around them.
"Good," Thanos half-yells back as he staggers toward the briefcase sitting beside the reactor. Her thumbs flick the locks open, and there, sitting inside, is the Tesseract.
"What are you doing?" the old man asks, alarmed as Thanos reaches for the cube. "That's not safe!"
Thanos ignores his warning and takes the Tesseract with her bare hands, and then all Anna could see is blue-and-white power.
Blood rushes loudly past his ears as new colors seep past the blue haze. The colors hurt him less than the blue and the guilt.
God, the guilt. It was consuming and so breath-taking and oh, god, all those people…
"Clint," a familiar voice pierces through the howl of silence and loyalty and death— "You're gonna be all right."
You're gonna be all right. As if it was that fucking easy.
"You know that?" he asks tightly as doubt latches itself onto his mind, doubling his guilt as red—god, what a fucking appropriate color—appears in his line of sight. "Is that what you know?"
The red moves, introducing black and something bright into the mix. Silver? He huffs. As if silver could line his shitty, blue-colored clouds now and besides, there was no window—
"I got no window," he mutters, realizing that's what he needed to— "I have to flush him out." The voice tells him something but he misses it completely over the too-loud sound of water being poured into a metal cup. "Don't understand you," he says, only just realizing that he was breathing too heavily.
He closes his eyes because the colors are too much now. There's no more blue, and fuck, but he misses it. Blue was simple. Blue was…
No. No, blue was bad. Blue meant killing people he wasn't supposed to kill, meant following a bastard he didn't want to follow.
He hadn't wanted to. He hadn't.
What happened? God, it felt like— "Have you ever had someone take your brain and play?" he asks aloud, knowing that someone was still there with him. "Pull you out," he whispers, "and stuff something back in." And then he sees the red and realizes who he's talking to, and if anyone can understand, it's her. Fuck, but it's always her. "You know what it's like to be unmade."
The colors are still too much, and Natasha's hair was like a halo of blood around pale skin that was oddly distorted and tinted with violet. "You know that I do," her lips say, her eyes so green they glowed. Her voice was like an anchor, pulling his focus to her and tweaking all the colors down, away from blue and back to normal.
The howls fade away, and Clint finally finds himself. Reason returns to him, and his first thought is—
"Why am I back?" he asks her, because he knew there had been no escape. The loyalty had been too firm, the desire to break away absolutely non-existent. He thought he'd follow that motherfucking cock-sucker until he was dead. "How'd you get him out?"
"Cognitive recalibration," Natasha replies, sitting beside him. "Coulson hit you really hard in the head."
…that's it? Clint tries not to laugh hysterically at the simple, fuck-all solution. "I'll have to thank him," he huffs.
Natasha's smile is small, but it always was, wasn't it? The fact that it's there at all meant more than words could express.
Clint almost smiles. "Natasha," he murmurs as her hands undo the restraints he hadn't even noticed was around his wrists, "how many agents did I—?"
"Don't," she says firmly, looking him in the eye. "Don't do that to yourself, Clint. This is Thanos," she tells him, and he has to swallow as he saw that she didn't blame him for the horrible things he knew he'd done. "This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for."
And then the name she said sinks in. "Thanos," he repeats. "I thought his name was Loki?"
Natasha shakes her head. "Loki was being possessed by Thanos," she informs him, unlatching the last buckle keeping him strapped to the bed. "Thanos is the real bad guy, and he's using Thor's daughter as a new host."
Clint abruptly remembers seeing Loki on the opposite side of the room from him, and he hadn't even noticed the disgust in his bones until he feels relief washing it away, because thank fuck, he hadn't kissed a magically-disguised Loki after all. "He get away?" he asks.
Red curls shake slightly as Natasha nods. "Don't suppose you know where?"
He shakes his head. "Didn't need to know. Didn't ask," he rasps, and Natasha gets up to give him space. "He's gonna make his play soon though," he adds, feeling his throat itch with dryness. "Today." He needed water—
She'd poured him water. He remembers hearing the sound overshadowing her voice. Clint pushes himself up and reaches for the upright cup on the tray, grateful that Natasha had known what he needed. He hasn't stopped for food or water since…
God, he had no idea what the date today even was.
"We have to stop him," Natasha says, derailing his attempt to remember when he'd last powered up.
"Yeah?" he asks, swallowing his water. "Who's we?"
At that, she smiles knowingly, wider now than before, and it's such a surprise that Clint almost drops his cup 'cause damn, Tasha's gorgeous like that.
Lips still curved up, Natasha assures him, "Oh, Clint. You're going to love this."