Baz sniffled and Tony handed her what must have been her fiftieth tissue. She closed her eyes and blew her nose.

"I think I'm okay now," she mumbled into the tissue.

"You sure? You seemed pretty messed up. Wanna...talk about it?"

"Maybe when we can go home and drink."

"That is such an unhealthy coping mechanism."

"You're one to talk, bro. All the AA people know your name."

"Yeah, but there's my alcoholism, and then there's your avoiding this specific thing by getting wasted."

Baz sighed. "Fine...We can talk about it once I'm out of here."

"We can do a sibling night. We'll watch serial killer documentaries and eat ice cream."

Baz raised an eyebrow at her brother. "Since when are you such a girl?"

"Since my baby sister, the strongest damn woman I know, woke up crying and needed her brother to be a bit of a girl to help her feel better."

"Now that's what I call character development."

Bucky's return to the hospital was a relief to both Stark siblings. Tony's legs had fallen asleep from sitting in a weird position for so long and he was tired of Baz teasing him for being old. Baz was mentally exhausted and needed the support that her boyfriend provided, but she tried to hide all of that by teasing her big brother.

"Bucky! You're back!"

Bucky grinned at the girl sitting up in the bed in front of him. He sat down, taking Tony's place at her side as the aforementioned big brother went to take a walk and get some strong coffee.

Baz took a deep breath. "And you showered. Damn."

"What?"

"You smell damn good after sitting with Tony's mechanical-grease-slash-too-much-espresso thing for so long."

Bucky chuckled and hugged his girlfriend. "Glad to see you too, you strange woman."

Baz beamed at him. "I need, like, a ten minute hug."

"That's doable."

"I really fucking love you."

Baz scrawled her signature over the line on the bottom of a form. Only a few more to go, and then she could finally check out.

Tony sauntered into the room, closing the door gently behind him. "How you doin', little sis?"

"I'm fine. Pushing paper, just like back at home."

Tony smiled. "Don't be like that. You're almost out of here. The IV is almost gone."

Baz glanced up at him, flashing her teeth. "I know. I'll be done in a few minutes and then we can leave."

"Sounds good."

"Sure as hell does."

The ride home was loud and wonderful. Baz had gotten to pick her companions, and even got first dibs on shotgun. (Because all of her friends took that whole "child at heart" thing way too seriously.)

She'd elected to place Clint there instead of taking it, sitting in between Bucky and Gia and letting Tony drive. He was going to give them all heart attacks with his speeding, but Baz felt the heart-pounding drive was an acceptable outlet for stress after her whole flu experience. According to Dr. Fletcher, her passing out had a simple cause: she'd reacted badly to the flu, even with the flu shot, and the reaction had been compounded by self-neglect.

It made sense, she wouldn't deny it, and the nightmare could be chalked up to leftover anxiety from the needles and the hospital in general. Like most of the group, she hated being cooped up inside. Hospitals made her especially anxious, although she couldn't figure out why. She'd worked as an aide at a senior home for a few years, so it wasn't the medical equipment or the other patients. She and Bruce had talked about it and he had theorized sensory overload. It was the running hypothesis.

Finally, after a thousand of Clint's dad jokes and cheesy positivity quotes, and a hundred astronomy factoids from Gia, Tony parked the car in his garage and Baz went inside to shower.

"Okay but who was worse, Ed Gein or Ted Bundy?"

Tony ate another spoonful of vanilla-caramel-chocolate ice cream. "That's a difficult one...Bundy killed more women but Gein was definitely creepier. I mean, bowls? Made of women's skulls? The fuck?"

Baz tapped the handle of her spoon against her chin. "But Bundy cut some of his victims' heads off with a fucking hacksaw."

"Yeah and he screwed their dead bodies too, but that still doesn't beat Gein's full-body Mommy skinsuit."

"True."

"And Gein tanned their skin. And he upholstered with it."

Baz shuddered. "Eeew. Gein may be super creepy, but the idea of coming across another Ted Bundy in real life is way scarier. Imagine you help a poor crippled guy put his groceries in his car and suddenly you've been hit over the head with a crowbar, strangled, and left in a forest somewhere for your murderer to come back and use your body as...ugh. Just ugh."

Tony stuck his spoon to his nose and crossed his eyes. "So anyway, tell me about this nightmare you had?"

Baz giggled, then sighed. "Fine."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Okay then. Please."

"Okay. Well. I woke up floating. Couldn't see a thing, weird unknown liquid dripped onto my face, all that jazz. Later I would discover it was blood or some other kind of bodily fluid. I don't really want to know what exactly my subconscious intended it to be, but it was wet and it was not water."

Baz licked her spoon as Tony listened intently, the documentary on cults now muted.

"And so I start rising. I speed up until suddenly I hit an invisible wall-"

"Maybe it was the glass ceiling," Tony interrupted. Baz pushed him with her foot until he almost fell off the couch. He got the message and shut up.

"Anyway, I blink and it goes from black to white. My eyes adjust, and...I see all of you guys. Just...in a pile. You and Bucky on top, and under you are Nat and Wade and Peter and everyone else I care about. All covered in blood...so I checked your pulses. I was desperate. Every single one...the result was always the same. Dead. All of you. The only people I care about in the whole world...dead."

"I'm...so sorry."

"Ohoho, but it gets worse." Baz wiped her eyes. "At the very bottom of the pile are Steve, Gia, and Clint. All laid out in a line. And I check each...each body for any signs of life, anything at all. When Gia was dead it nearly broke me. But Clint was last and he was alive. And that's what sent me over the fucking waterfall in a plastic cup. No hope of survival."

"None. Zero."

"Exactly. Straight to Hell in a handbasket. Do not pass Go, Do not collect 200 dollars."

"So what happened?"

"So I sat there and hugged Clint and he was comforting because he is everyone's dad, and I just sat there with him and we cried until you woke me up."

"That sounds fucking awful. C'mere."

Baz put her tub of chocolate marshmallow swirl ice cream down on the glass coffee table and scootched over on the couch until she was squished up against her brother's side. They sat together and just breathed, Baz reminding herself that everyone was alive and Tony telling himself this was a one-off, that Baz would be okay.