Day 13: Hiding Injury (Part 2 of Day 9: Buried Alive). Trapped under the bank, one of the Avengers is hiding a serious injury.
Tony Stark was aware of two things when he came around. One, his head hurt, and two, he couldn't feel the rest of his body.
"J, w'ke up," Tony hissed, but there was no response—not even the slightest flicker in any of his sensors.
So three, his HUD was dead.
He heard a large mass shifting and braced himself, but the impact never came. Then he heard a groan from above him, and another shift, this time in the opposite direction.
He recognized that groan.
"'eve?" he rasped.
"Yeah."
"W're we?"
He heard another shift and instinctively tried to lift his hands to protect himself. His arms moved slightly—an improvement over before—but hardly left the ground. Steve groaned again, and the shifting stopped.
"W's wrong?" Tony asked, as a feeling of helplessness surged within him. Steve knew where the emergency release was on the suit. So if he hadn't freed Tony, they were either in a place where it was better for him to stay in the suit, or Steve wasn't able to free him.
With a sinking feeling, he suspected it was the latter.
"'member… the robbery?" Steve gasped, his voice thin and strained.
"Yeah."
"'lding caved in."
Panic surged within Tony and he had to force himself to breathe as deeply as he could with the nose of the suit a scant inch from his face.
"Where're we now?" Now that some feeling returned to his limbs, he tried to push himself up, to pop off his face plate, but he collided with something hard—something human, something Steve based on the groan. They couldn't have been more than a foot apart.
"St'y still," Steve ordered breathlessly.
Tony was on full alert the next second. "What's wrong?" he demanded.
"Kinda… holdin' up the ceiling."
Oh shit.
"Okay, okay," Tony began to mumble as he ran through their options, but quickly realized all of them would be useless without a visual grasp of the situation.
"I need to pop up my face plate," he said slowly. "I need to see what's going on, so I can hopefully get us out of here. If I don't sit up, can I reach my face?"
He heard a shift.
"I can't see you, Steve. Yes or no?"
There was a long pause filled with Steve's heavy breathing. "Y'th."
"Okay, starting to move now." Tony slowly snaked his right arm along the armor, colliding gently with a vertical something by his shoulder.
"Arm," Steve hissed, before Tony could ask. So it appeared Steve was braced over him, holding up the ceiling with his back.
God.
It was a bit of a blocker, but Tony still had enough mobility to reach the release on the face plate and pop it open.
It thunked into something, thankfully not soft and fleshy. Given that the suit was dead, Tony wasn't surprised to see mostly darkness around them, but he was surprised to see the arc reactor wasn't totally dead. Though it was cracked down the middle, it was still flickering unevenly. Thankfully it wasn't powering his heart anymore, so Tony didn't have to worry about going into cardiac arrest, but it wasn't producing enough energy to power either the suit or JARVIS. Though maybe it could send out a weak distress signal somehow...
But that was for later. More importantly was evaluating the ceiling and potentially bracing it, so there would be time for projects like rewiring the arc.
Steve's head was a bit lower, hanging around Tony's shoulders. He looked up at the sound of the face plate popping open, which allowed Tony to see his face was covered in blood, which dripped from a deep gash over his eye. In the weak light from the arc, the effect was ghastly, almost ghoulish.
"Steve!"
"S'perficial," Steve grunted, then shifted back slightly as the ceiling moaned again.
"Have you been able to get in touch with anyone else?"
"No." There was another shift just then, drawing out the 'o' of Steve's response.
Jesus.
They had to find a way to brace the ceiling before even Steve in his superness couldn't hold it up anymore.
Tony took a quick look around the space. It was small, only about six inches around him on any side. Large slabs of concrete crisscrossed above Steve, and from their angle, were desperately trying to crash to the ground. Steve had managed to catch a long piece across his back, which was keeping this small pocket free for them.
Without his faceplate, debris drizzled down on Tony's face, and he knew they didn't have long before the large slabs cracked under the weight of what they were holding.
"It doesn't look like there's a good way to brace the ceiling other than what you're doing," Tony reported. "Sorry."
"Figured."
"So I'm going to try to rewire the arc to send a signal aboveground, okay?"
Steve didn't respond.
"Okay, Steve?"
"Yup," Steve gasped. "Just hurry."
There was something in his voice that gave Tony pause. Sure Steve was straining to hold up the ceiling, but there was a note of something else in his tone.
The slabs shifted again and Steve's body slipped closer to Tony's before he was able to catch it.
"What if I hold it for a minute? So you can get a break?" Tony offered, but as soon as the words left his mouth he knew he wouldn't be able to. Without a fully working suit, he wouldn't be able to hold the weight on his own. Even if he could lock out the suit's joints, he didn't know what damage they'd sustained during the original cave-in. "Or we can share."
"Jus' send the call," Steve said. "Got this." Then with an unholy cry, he rose up a little until he could straighten out his elbows again, putting some additional space between him and Tony.
By the time he was finished, Steve was breathing hard, gasping, but his inhales were short and pained, with more than just exertion.
"Where are you hurt?" Tony demanded, lifting himself as much as he could so he had a better look at Steve's face.
The supersoldier just shook his head and let it drop down between his shoulders again. "Hurry… Tony!"
It must be bad—and more than just imminent death due to cave-in bad—for Steve to be deflecting like this.
However, said deflection was probably appropriate in the circumstances. Sandwiched like this, with only minimal power left in the arc, there most likely wasn't anything Tony could do about any injury of Steve's, so he turned his attention back to his reactor and began to expose the wires. That slight shift in position, however, changing the angle of the arc's weak glow, allowed Tony to see something jagged poking out of Steve's side, which was dripping onto the suit and pooling on the cracked cement beside them.
"Steve." Even as he said it, Tony knew there was nothing he could do. Without power to his gauntlet, he couldn't cauterize the wound, and he couldn't get at any of his clothing beneath his armor to press against the wound.
And Tony hated it.
Steve swallowed hard, then looked up as much as he could. "Nothin' you can do," he grunted. "Distress call," he added, staring pointedly at the reactor.
"Yup."
Tony's fingers were flying, pulling off the glass, loosening the housing.
"Keep talking to me, Steve. I need to know you're hanging in there."
"Am."
"More than that. Tell me a story."
"'bout how we get out of here?"
"That would be a little on the nose, but anything you want, really," Tony said as he freed wires and coils and began reworking their configuration into an elementary antenna. "The floor is yours."
"Didja know I wanted to go to art school?"
Without looking away from his work, Tony shook his head. "Nope, none of that 'I wish my life would have been different', deathbed-type confessions. Find something else to serenade me with."
"Not a confession."
"Find something else," Tony ground out.
With another snap, the antenna was done and Tony began sending a signal by touching two of the loose wires together in an SOS. Given the weak flicker of the arc, the signal would barely be anything but hopefully it was enough. The team would be listening; of that Tony was certain. All the signal had to do was make it far enough to be picked up.
Steve lifted his head slightly to watch Tony through eyes barely wider than slits. Knowing they didn't have much longer, Tony began tapping the wire together faster, unspooling what was left with his free hand.
But then the worst case scenario happened, and Steve's eyes rolled up into his head. He slouched forward, the concrete slabs above him hurriedly following. Tony had barely a second to engage the gauntlets and catch the ceiling a mere few inches over Steve's back. He flinched as they groaned, and the metal of the suit crinkled slightly, but despite all odds, it held.
Pressed together like this, Tony could hear Steve's uneven breathing into his neck—Steve was still alive, but just barely. More worryingly, however, Tony could now hear the pings of blood as they dripped against his armor. Now holding up the ceiling himself, Tony was unable to access the distress signal, and was reduced to hoping the little bit of signal he'd managed had gone through.
That's the end of today's prompt, but clearly they are rescued and Tony takes it upon himself to design the stealth suit since the BONY suit is no longer salvageable.
Up next: Day 14: "I Didn't Mean It". How Winn angered Pam from HR (referenced in 3x15).
Thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!
