A/N: Thank you so much for all your lovely reviews, it's much appreciated! Hope you enjoy this chapter.
Damnit, it wasn't supposed to be Stark that got hurt, Natasha thought savagely. Him, Hulk, Thor...they were supposed to be practically invulnerable. Stark had all that armour. What was the point if it didn't protect him? Worse, Stark was a civilian at heart. He was a billionaire. He should be off driving fast cars, running his company, partying with movie stars...he shouldn't be trading punches with aliens and giant robots, no matter how good at it he was.
She'd made report after report, talking until her throat was hoarse, going over every detail of the Leighton Springs incident, as they were calling it now. Director Fury and Agent Hill had wanted more and more information, asking questions that she just didn't know the answer to. That was understandable, she supposed. They wanted to understand what had happened. How Stark had come to get reduced to so much hamburger paste.
Trouble was, there weren't so many answers to give. The whole fight was on the news, courtesy of some jerk in a weather chopper, and even having watched it a hundred times, she wasn't so sure what they could have done differently.
Somehow, it made it worse to think that there were no lessons to be learned here.
Free for the moment, she drifted purposefully down to the infirmary and found herself staring at an empty room.
"They took him back into surgery," a voice said from behind her, and she turned to see Bruce standing there laden down with a pile of monitors.
"I thought that was tomorrow," she said, frowning. She knew that Stark had more surgery scheduled, and she didn't like the idea they were changing the plan. It didn't sound like a good sign.
Bruce shrugged. "From what Pepper told me, the doc said that if they put this operation forwards, they could start on some new drug therapy tomorrow and get him ready for the next lot of surgeries sooner."
She nodded uneasily. "Have you seen the others?" she asked. If she wasn't able to visit Stark, she might as well go and join in everyone's favourite past time these days; sitting in silence and staring at the walls.
"The last I saw, Thor and Cap were heading to the gym," Bruce told her. "Something about sparring...I think they were just planning on smacking the crap out of each other and calling it stress relief."
To be honest, Natasha could see the appeal. "It's difficult, not being able to do anything," she said quietly. None of them were exactly suited to sitting around and waiting for news. "How about Clint?"
"I haven't seen him," Bruce said, shifting slightly. "You mind giving me a hand with these?"
"Of course," she said, stepping forwards and taking two of the screens away from him. "What are you doing anyway?"
"Figured I'd get some screens set up on the ceiling above the bed there," he explained, walking over and staring up thoughtfully. "I thought Tony might appreciate having something to do."
The last she'd heard, Stark was still unconscious twenty three hours a day. But she could understand the thought. "The last thing any of us need is Tony Stark getting bored," she commented, laying the monitors down on the table.
"Yeah," Bruce said with a sad smile. "Remember when he - "
" - don't," she interrupted harshly.
Blinking, he just looked at her .
"Don't eulogise him," she elaborated. "Stark's one stubborn son of a bitch. He's going to be flying around, annoying the hell out of me before you know it."
"Right," Bruce agreed quietly, just a little too late.
The truth was, she didn't believe it either. She sighed. "You know something? I never thought it would end like this."
"You think this will be the end the Avengers ?" Bruce asked slowly.
Honestly, she didn't know. The Avengers had always been the six of them. Going on without Stark? It sounded...difficult. She looked away. "Tony will recover," she said with more optimism than faith. "Come on. I'll help you get these screens set up. Wouldn't want Stark to go too long without his porn."
Thor did not like spending time in hospitals. Not back on Asgard and not here either. Seeing his friends and comrades lying injured always made him feel like he had failed.
This was no exception. Tony Stark was badly injured and Thor felt...helpless. Small. Scared. It was not a sensation he cared for.
He had rejoiced when they'd realised that Tony was alive and would likely remain so, and even though he had seen the extent of the man's injuries, he had not truly understood that they were life changing.
It was difficult to imagine a man like Tony Stark might be bed ridden for the rest of his life. Pepper Potts had asked him whether there was any Asgardian technology that might help. It had shamed him to have to confess that he genuinely was not certain, but without the Bifrost or the Tesseract it was a largely futile question. He could not get to Asgard in order to interrogate their healers.
It haunted him that perhaps there was a way to help his friend that should be within his grasp.
"You going to visit Tony?" Clint asked, jogging up to him.
"Yes," he answered.
Clint nodded. "Yeah, try using the door handle this time."
Thor glowered. "That was necessary," he insisted. When he and Steve had got there, Pepper and a group of doctors had been standing outside the door, desperately trying to get back in. His heart had been in his mouth, afraid that something worse had happened, and Pepper had turned and looked at them with desperation in her eyes. Thor had looked at Steve Rogers, and at Steve's nod they'd wrenched the door away.
He had a suspicion that at some point someone was going to make him pay for it. Clint had explained to him – in S.H.I.E.L.D, even the maintenance department were badass. He still was not exactly sure why that was a compliment.
At any rate, he made a point of looking at Clint before he exaggeratedly laid his hand on the handle and gently pushed the door open.
Pepper looked up at them and smiled, deep dark shadows beneath her eyes. She looked like a woman who had been living somewhere beyond the limits of her endurance for many days, and Thor was suddenly gripped with a desperate need to call Jane.
She didn't say anything. At this stage, there wasn't anything to say.
Tony lay on his back, his eyes closed, his face pale as ice.
"Hello," Thor said awkwardly, sounding ridiculous to his own ears. "Is there any news?" he asked Pepper.
She shook her head quickly. "Nothing new," she said with a twist of a smile. "There's a neurosurgery consultation scheduled this evening. Dr Strange was talking about another MRI..." She shook her head. "None of them are saying anything new."
Thor nodded. Somewhere inside, he was still hoping that this would all turn out to be some trick, or illusion. Some lie their enemies had created. Something they could fight against. "How are you?" he asked softly.
"I'm bearing up just fine," she said with a patently false brightness, as if she had answered that question a hundred times too often.
He squeezed her shoulder gently. "If there is anything I can do..." he offered, and he didn't even know what that might be. He just knew that he meant anything.
"He's awake," Clint commented suddenly, and Thor looked around quickly. There was no apparent change in Tony's face.
"Are you sure?" he asked stupidly, because of course Clint was sure. By the nature of his calling, Clint was adept at reading the most subtle of signs.
Pepper didn't look surprised. "He's been awake a few times," she said, her voice cracking. "I can tell. I can tell when he's faking sleeping through board meetings, I can still tell now. But he just won't talk to me." She broke off into miserable, lonely sobs, and uncomfortably, but instinctively, Thor put his arms around her, and comforted her as best he could.
Tony never even opened his eyes.
It was late and Steve couldn't sleep, and that was hardly unusual over the past couple of weeks.
He had the routine down just fine now. He'd stare fixedly at his book for a couple of hours as the words danced in front of his eyes, then he'd get up and wander the corridors of the helicarrier, scaring the life out of the night crew, and after an hour or so of that, he'd find himself in the infirmary, fetching Pepper coffee and watching Tony sleep, or pretend to sleep at least. Then, as dawn was breaking, he'd head back to his room, collapse on the bed, fall asleep for an hour or so and wake up exhausted, knowing that the next night he'd be doing the same thing all over again.
Back when he was a kid, whenever he couldn't sleep, he'd go split a soda with Bucky. Later it would be a beer, whether it had any effect or not. Nowadays, if he wandered the tower at night, he'd find Tony. Drinking in the kitchen with Clint, or down in his lab, working on something that Steve didn't have a hope of understanding.
Even now, it was difficult to believe that Tony wouldn't be downstairs, just sitting up and waiting for him. But then again, sometimes he found it difficult to remember that he couldn't go grab a beer with Bucky anymore.
Whatever Tony said, he was a soldier. He expected losses. That didn't make it any easier to bear.
He sighed and stood up and headed out. If nothing else, he could at least try and exhaust himself.
The nurses stationed in the infirmary didn't even give him a second glance when he got downstairs. That was one advantage of being on the helicarrier, rather than a regular hospital, he supposed. People here were used to them.
To his surprise, Tony was awake when he opened the door, weakly raising a hand to his lips without looking round.
Quiet. He spied Pepper curled up on a chair in the corner. Right.
On some level, it always surprised him that out of all of them it was Tony who had a serious girlfriend. He played the part of the billionaire playboy perfectly, and from what Steve understood, up until recently he'd lived it, but in spite of a staggering number of offers, he made it clear that Pepper was the only woman for him.
Steve envied him a little. Every time he thought of Peggy.
Oh, Thor had Jane, but that seemed to be permanently stuck in some long distance, early days complication that Steve didn't pretend to understand. He just listened and commiserated, and joined with Bruce in advising what flowers and chocolates and gifts Thor should get her. The one time Thor had asked Tony for advice, Tony had smiled and said that while he could tell them how to get any girl in the world to fall into bed with them, it had taken him well over a decade to get the woman he loved to consider dating him, and did any of them really want to follow that example? They really, really hadn't.
And sometimes, Steve thought that there might be something going on between Natasha and Clint. He'd noticed a few glances. A couple of secret smiles. But then sometimes he was convinced he was imagining it.
At any rate, really, Tony was the only one who had someone waiting up at home, worrying about him.
That just made it all the worse.
He pulled another chair over beside the bed. "How did you know I was here?" he asked.
In response, Tony pointed up at the ceiling. There were a few screens up there, positioned where Tony could easily see them from his bed. One of them showed the security feed from all the surrounding corridors.
"Fury know you've hacked into his system?" Steve asked.
"Yeah," Tony said tiredly. "He's giving me a pass."
Right now, Tony could probably hijack the helicarrier and fly them all to Timbuktu and Fury would give him a pass. Not that Steve was exactly in a hurry to give him any ideas.
His attention was caught by the video on the other screen. He swallowed hard, troubled. "Tony - "
" - quiet, it's getting to the good part," Tony said, still not looking round.
The footage from the chopper over Leighton Springs. The giant mech – Tony had given some complicated reason why it wasn't actually a giant robot, but Steve still wasn't exactly sure he understood – stood in the middle of campus, forty foot high at least. Thor, Hulk and Iron Man were attacking it, but they looked like ants attacking an elephant. Hawkeye was shooting arrows from a building off to the side, Steve knew, but he was out of shot. It wasn't like the arrows had done anything. Armour piercing, explosive...every little trick in Clint's quiver had simply bounced right off.
He and Natasha had been off trying to track down and disable the cybernetic link.
They hadn't been quick enough.
As he watched, the mech struck out at Thor, sending him smashing into a wall, and he sat up sluggishly, clearly dazed, and Steve winced to see the blood as the mech prepared a follow up strike.
The blow never landed. Iron Man flew between Thor and the mech, and the thing hit him instead. Then, instead of retreating back out of reach, Iron Man darted forwards.
Steve remembered why. Remembered Tony's voice saying that he thought he could see a weak spot. The terrible thing was, even on this shaky footage, he could see what Tony was talking about. A bundle of exposed cables between armour panels. It looked...promising. The fight had been going against them. He would have done the exact same thing.
Only when Tony tore the cables out, somehow it just made the mech, or whoever was controlling it, mad. It knocked Iron Man out of the sky and stamped on him. Then it stamped on him again. And again. And again, and Steve could see the cracks spreading on the ground beneath its foot.
He hadn't seen this at the time. He just remembered hearing Clint's cry of helpless rage, his blood turning to ice.
The mech raised its leg, not caring that its enemy was down and wouldn't be getting up again, and that was when Thor and Hulk, working in perfect synch, threw themselves on the thing, tackling it and throwing it backwards.
"Stop," Tony said abruptly. "Jarvis, rewind to 3:46."
The AI's voice seemed to come from all around them. "Sir, I really must suggest - "
" - I didn't program you to argue with me," Tony said curtly.
"That is precisely what you did program me for," Jarvis said, and Steve would never get used to how human the thing sounded. Right now it sounded...worried.
But it played the footage back to the point where Tony had spotted the cables.
"I should have known better," he said quietly. "Look at that, will you? It's so...obvious. If something is vital, you protect it. Did I really think I'm the only person who knows that? I'm an idiot."
"We were losing," Steve said quietly. "You saw a chance and you took it."
"And look where it got me," Tony said darkly.
"You're going to get through this, Tony," he said determinedly. "We're going to get through this."
"I'm crippled. How are we going to get through that?" Tony demanded bitterly.
He hesitated. "A friend of mine once told me that there's always a way out," he said, looking Tony straight in the eye.
Tony swallowed hard. "I'm scared. I hate being scared."
"Sometimes it's okay," he said. Sometimes fear was the only possible reaction. "Don't let it control you."
No one had ever accused Tony of being slow on the uptake. "You mean stop hiding."
"You don't stop avoiding us, Barton is going to carry on stealing your pudding," Steve warned.
Tony laughed slightly. "Making bad jokes at insensitive times? I thought that was my thing."
"Apparently you're contagious," he said solemnly. "I caught Maria Hill making fun of Fury the other day."
"Did he make her walk the plank?" Tony asked sleepily.
Steve smiled. "No," he said, and he told the whole story and watched Tony drift off to sleep.
"Thank you, Captain," Jarvis said once he had finished.
"Ah, you're welcome," he said, caught off guard.
Maybe now he could get some sleep himself.