It's already a warzone by the time they bust out the elevator doors.
Not a warzone Steve is used to—one with bullets and tanks and explosions everywhere. It's too quiet, for one thing.
There are a few familiar elements, though. Someone roaring like an animal, the clang of fabric on metal, the sound of stuttered breathing.
Someone muttering in German.
And it takes Steve three endless heartbeats to realize he's trembling. He's so blindsided by the sight before him that Tony takes charge.
"Romanov, Barton." Tony retracts his helmet and points to the bunker. "Get that soda can open."
Nat makes a sharp motion with her chin. "On it."
They run around the back and disappear from view. Clint tries shooting the viewing window on the way by but it's no use. Bullets ricochet over their heads.
"Peter!" Steve swallows.
Peter's eyes are rolling, face already purple. He's scrabbling at the metal. He sees Steve and reaches a hand out.
Steve is at the boy's side in an instant. He recognizes the problem in one glance. "I'm here. I'll lift you up, Pete."
Steve grips his son under the knees and alleviates the pressure. It works a little. Peter makes horrid choking sounds that Steve knows he'll take to the grave.
Bucky is responsible for the most noise out of everyone, pounding on the bunker door, shrieking his rage so loudly his voice cracks from the abuse. Bullet wounds along his ribs have started bleeding afresh from exertion.
"You bastard!" He peppers it with Russian insults and expletives Steve is too focused on Peter to listen to. "You'd kill a child instead of facing us, you coward!"
"I could say the same for you!" Zemo hisses at Tony. "You killed my wife, my son! The Avengers are menaces on the world!"
"So that's your play, huh?" Tony's literally having a panic attack in front of God and country, but he slips into his best weapon—talking. "All along, this had nothing to do with assassins or government regimes. No. There's just a petty man who wants to get revenge."
Tony chatters on but his eyes are glued to the fingers around Peter's throat. He tugs at them, uses a screwdriver extension to pry at the plates. Nothing works.
And Peter…
Peter's struggles slow down.
Zemo, strangely, is the one weeping. "I knew if I fought you, you'd just band together. No, I needed to kill you from the inside out. To make you hate each other so completely the Avengers died. I was just going to use that footage—"
Tony follows Zemo's eyes to a screen in the corner.
"—But then I heard you had a child."
Steve runs his hand over Peter's hair, words running together like paint in a downpour. "I'm so sorry, baby. So sorry! We're here. We love you, Peter."
Peter's eyes have long since closed.
"And how would you feel," Zemo calls over the growing racket, "if you had to watch someone murder that child—and have your best friend defend that person?"
Tony and Steve lock eyes. Steve feels the truth of how this could go under his skin. It nettles, tiny thorns in Stark's eyes that build and grow and tear at the flesh of his loyalty.
Who would you choose? Tony or—
"Blow it off!" Bucky breaks the electric moment. "Now!"
Chest rising and falling too fast, Tony's cheeks puff out. "What? Are you—"
"It's powered by the nerve impulses of my own shoulder!" Bucky's tone sings with urgency. The whites of his eyes shine in the dim. Steve has never seen him this frenzied, not even when they were kids. "Blow my arm off, Stark! Just do it!"
"Barnes—"
"NOW!"
Tony doesn't wait for a second invitation. Peter's been without air for over three minutes. His chest isn't moving, a horrifying contrast to Tony.
The engineer stands back, gauntlet raised. "Ready?"
Steve covers Peter's lolling head with his shield. "Ready!"
A low chirp whines higher and higher in pitch. Steve winces, lips in Peter's hair, just as the blast comes. It's blinding even behind his eyelids.
There's a sudden give when Bucky's arm separates from his body. Steve catches Peter on the descent.
The hand sparks around Peter's throat, zapping the boy's skin. Steve rushes to pull the now lax fingers away, throwing the metal arm far from Peter. From his son.
My…our boy.
Steve collects Peter into his arms and rocks, just like they did on that warehouse floor. How had he ever lived without this boy, this perfect puzzle piece in his heart?
"Cap, he's not breathing!"
What?
"Steve! Set him down!"
Natasha is suddenly there. She rips Peter from Steve's arms and lays him on his back.
"Borderline hypothermic. Onset of fever. No pulse," she lists off like a sit rep. "No pulse or breathing."
Natasha leans down to breath into Peter's mouth with a pinch to his nose. The heels of her hands pump up and down on Peter's sternum. There's a loud crack and everybody flinches at the sound. But no one stops Natasha. A broken rib is better than dying.
"Come on, Peter. Come on, solnyshko." Natasha's ponytail is falling out, hair a cage around her tight face. "Don't leave us now, not after we've come so far."
Since Tony has started yelling at Zemo, Natasha taps her comm. "Bruce. We need a defibrillator."
She breathes into him again and sits back, pale.
"Let me." Bucky kneels beside her, panting from pain and blood loss. "I can't do chest compressions but I can give him this."
Bucky leans down and breathes into Peter. "I'm so sorry," he whispers when he sits back up, watching Natasha push and push. "This is all my fault, malysh."
"I want to say yes, but it isn't." Tony skids to Peter's side, eyes a nuclear fire on Barnes. "Thank you for protecting him this far."
Barnes just nods. He watches Peter.
"We're running out of time." Tony pulls Peter out from under Natasha's hands. The boy's face has gone from magenta to a waxy yellow. "On route, Bruce."
He engages the boot thrusters, Peter dead weight in his arms, and flies through a smoke stack shaft down the hall.
The three sit back on their heels, listening to the suit fly away to the quinjet. It seems impossible, but the whole ordeal lasted less than five minutes. Everyone feels like they've aged ten years in that span.
After the maelstrom, this eerie hush is torture. Steve sags. He tears off his cowl to put both hands over his eyes.
Dead weight. Dead…
No. Peter can't be. Not after they just got him back.
"I didn't mean to." Steve and Natasha's heads whirl at Bucky's voice. The soldier's lashes flutter. "I asked him to put the chip in…my fault…"
That's the most warning they get before Bucky falls forward. Steve drops his shield and lunges to catch his friend around the chest.
It's just Natasha here and Steve feels safe enough to be vulnerable—to wrap his other arm around Bucky in an embrace.
Without Peter there to see, Bucky's defenses drop too. Every ounce of tension and fear he's been holding back seeps out in faint quivering. He buries his stone cold nose in the crook of Steve's neck. A low keening erupts from his mouth.
"It's okay. Zemo strangled Peter, not you." Steve doesn't understand why Bucky's shoulder is wet until he realizes he's crying into it. Shock and the head injury play with his sense of time. "I'm here. You're safe. I'm only sorry it took us so long."
"I'm sorry I gave you a concussion."
Steve snorts a laugh. It dissolves into a sob almost instantly.
Natasha keeps her gun low but loaded to guard them. She stands and shifts her weight forward to the balls of her feet.
It's a posture Steve knows like an oft-repeated prayer. She's upset. "Nat?"
She ignores Steve to tap on her comm. Her teeth grind against each other. "Does anyone have eyes on Zemo?"
A pause while she listens to someone's response. Steve looks to the tank—
Natasha growls. "Because he gave us the slip."
—Completely empty.
The snow isn't at full strength yet. Fat flakes swirl in ballerina pirouettes, the gauze of sleet fluttering over his lashes and tufts of hair surrounding his ears.
Despite having his target in sight, he doesn't dive in.
The diminutive Zemo sits back against a rock. His cellphone is now on speakerphone. It plays a message from his wife, which, judging by the hopeless mania in his eyes, is about the hundredth time he's done so.
Clint's boots make only the slightest rustle in the new snow. "We couldn't figure out a personal angle, with parts of your file missing. They both died in the battle of Sokovia?"
Zemo doesn't startle or turn around. He just waits. Then nods, once. Together, he and Clint stare out over the Siberian tundra.
"I'm sorry," Clint whispers and means it dearly.
"You may shoot me now," says Zemo, calm as can be. "Have your revenge."
Clint's hands fist. "Do you know that we would have forgiven you, if you had come after one of us?"
Zemo finally glances up. Clint channels every iota of helplessness and sorrow he's felt the last two days.
"If you'd kidnapped me or Tony or one of the others, sure we would have been outraged. But we would've understood. Revenge, vigilante justice on the perpetrator, and all that. As much as we hate it, that's a language we speak."
Zemo's jaw firms. He turns his shoulder again to Clint, eyes on the snow at his feet.
"But our child, an innocent light who's done absolutely nothing to you? You deserve whatever hellhole they put you in."
"You're a family man," says Zemo. "You're just like me."
Clint's nostrils flare but he doesn't deny it.
"You would have done the same thing, if I had dropped a city on your wife and children." Zemo takes a short breath. "You only stand self righteous because you're on the winning side!"
One tear falls to the snow, melting it. And Clint's heart aches. He watches Zemo unravel from the inside out and aches deep inside his core.
Aches for loved ones lost. For families cut off. For innocence stolen, all of the turmoil and hurt that caused this broken man to lash out with such prejudice.
"And now I go to join my family. Goodbye, Agent Barton."
Zemo's lips kiss around the barrel of the gun. Clint falls into a fighting stance before Zemo can touch the trigger. In a lightning fast maneuver, Clint pins Zemo's arms down using his legs, right arm around Zemo's neck.
With his left fist, he bumps Zemo's outstretched wrist at a central nerve point. Zemo winces and drops the gun.
Zemo only struggles for a moment before he gives in to the fact he's overpowered. Clint holds him down easily, heaving more from emotion than effort.
"You're wrong," he hisses in Zemo's ear. "I wouldn't have killed your child in retaliation for taking mine."
Zemo gurgles out a bawl and that too is born of pure emotion.
Clint closes his eyes, thinking of Peter's panicked face. His desperation to get to them. "But you're right about one thing, Zemo. I am planning revenge. Do you want to know what it is?"
Zemo spits at Clint's boots. "Conveniently killing me on the way to a trial, so you don't have to take responsibility?"
Fire erupts in Clint's bones, in the very pockets of his lungs, the space between heartbeats. Not the fire of anger. Not helplessness like on the quinjet.
This is pride.
"No, Zemo." A vein pulses in Clint's forehead. He breathes through the flames of love washing over him as he thinks of Peter. "Your punishment will be watching that precious boy grow up. You'll have to see him change the world, every day of his beautiful life, to love others around him and be loved—and to know that not only did you fail in taking that away from him, but you don't get the privilege of being a part of it."
Zemo's enraged posture deflates. He goes very still. It's an odd, rare brand of stillness and it arrests Clint too for a beat.
Clint taps his ear. "Nat?"
"You got him?"
"Yeah, Zemo's in custody. How's…how is he, Tash?"
There's a pause over the comm that encompasses the whole world. It's hideous not in it's length but in the way Clint can hear Natasha struggling to rein in her emotions. He hasn't heard hesitation like this since Coulson died.
Clint bows his head.
"You'd better come see him for yourself," says Natasha, so quiet Clint can barely hear her. "The defib got his heart started again but…"
"Tash?"
"His brain was deprived of oxygen for almost six minutes, Clint."
(Water races up Peter's nostrils, down his throat, stinging his eyes. He can't tell which direction is the surface. Each wave drags him down further into the depths.
It is silent under the water, the silence of outer space. Of stars.
"Stay with me, Peter!"
Hadn't he and Clint just been looking at the stars?
CRASH!
Another assault flips Peter's body like a tumbleweed. His hands flail.
"What did you just give him, Bruce?"
Bruce is here, under the water too?
"A cocktail version of norepinephrine. It'll get his blood pressure up. He's dangerously close to flat lining again as is."
There! Sunlight speckles a roof of water above his head. Peter reaches out a hand but it's no use.
He sinks further down.)
