A/N: Hello, friends, and welcome to Chapter Sixteen! I know this one's pretty long, and I apologize, but there was quite a bit of stuff I wanted to cover, and it kind of just kept coming. Please read and review, I would really appreciate it, and as always, thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: All characters owned by Marvel.
Chapter Sixteen
Tony flew up the square-shaped hole in the emergency stairs, the white light flashing from the basement brightening the hallway like daylight. "Jarvis," he said, "Hit the alarm, evacuate the tower. And drop the shielding from the basement, the arc reactor's about to go up!"
"Yes, sir!" Jarvis said, and instantly blinking red lights illuminated the stairs, the screaming sound of the alarm nearly drowning out the armor's repulsors. He kept going, hoping to reach the top floors and grab some of the Avengers who couldn't fly. His thoughts turned to his friends in the basement. God, Carol, I'm so sorry. If we'd had more time, maybe we could have thought of something less volatile…
He flew into the common room, bursting the doors from their hinges. Luke Cage and Danny Rand were standing at the entrance to the hall, ushering Clint, Natasha, Bobbi and Logan toward the balcony. "Tony!" Cage shouted. "What's going on?"
"Luke! Where are Jessica and Dani?" Tony asked.
"Not here, Jess took Dani to see her mom," Luke replied.
Tony grabbed Luke and Danny around the arms and started moving them down the hall. "Best news I've heard all day," he said. "Now let's get the hell out of here."
They flew down the hallway, landing next to the balcony doors, where they were met by Thor. "Iron Man!" Thor said. "What is the distress?"
"Grab a couple buddies and fly, Big Guy, we've got to get away from the tower," Tony replied, hefting Natasha onto his back.
"What's going on?" Natasha asked.
"The arc reactor in the basement is about to go kaboom," Tony said. He took off into the air, going slow so as not to lose anyone, and landed on a roof two blocks from the tower.
"Did I just hear you say," Logan said, dropping from Thor's back as he landed, "That the arc reactor is going up?"
Tony didn't answer, and instead kept staring at the tower.
"Aren't Peter and Carol down there?" Logan continued, his voice a low, rumbling growl.
The blue lights of Iron Man's eyes looked down at the rooftop.
"Stark!" Logan shouted, his claws extended and ready to rip Tony's armor off piece by piece. The only thing that kept him in place was Thor's hand on his shoulder. "What happened? What did you do?"
Tony never got a chance to respond, as white light flashed up from the basement, rising from the bottom as though it were a carnival game trying to ring a bell on the roof.
XXXXXX
Jessica rose as soon as the alarm started, rushing around the room and trying to find a wheelchair or something she could use to get Steve out of the building. Finding nothing immediately at hand, she elected to simply try to lift him off the ground and fly him out.
"Argh!" Steve groaned, grabbing his ribs.
"Sorry!" Jess said, laying him back down. "I guess that's not gonna work."
"Probably not," Steve replied.
She wiped the back of her hand across her brow. "I probably couldn't carry you and fly anyway," she said. "Dammit, this has to have something to do with Peter and Carol."
Steve eased himself back off the bed and onto his feet. "We can't worry about that right now," he said. "We need to get out."
Jessica nodded, and walked over to Steve, putting his arm over her shoulders. Tears were running unbidden down her cheeks, stinging hot as they reached her lips and salted her tongue. She knew something had gone wrong with Peter's cure, and that her best friend may very well be dead. But she also knew her responsibilities, and that she couldn't abandon Captain America to go rush into a situation where she'd most likely be in the way.
As they reached the doorway, however, they felt, more than heard, a rumbling rushing through the floor, and realized that they had run out of time. But a second later they heard a much more present rumbling as the Hulk smashed through the side of the medical center, grabbing them both and wrapping them in his massive green arms. Hulk dropped to his knees, sheltering Steve and Jess with his bulk, as bright white light exploded into the room.
XXXXXX
Tony looked back at the tower and thanked everything he knew of that it was still intact. Which said nothing for the interior, but at least the buildings, and more importantly the people, around the tower were fine.
"Oh, man," Clint said. "Jess and Steve were still in medical!"
"Did we forget about Peter and Carol being in the basement?" Logan shouted.
"Jarvis?" Tony said, turning his head. "What happened?"
"I managed to filter the majority of the explosion's energy through the arc reactor and into the rest of the tower," the A.I. said. "I'm fairly certain it burned out everything that requires electricity, however."
"Don't worry about that, it's just stuff," Tony said. "What about anyone left inside? Is everyone ok?"
Jarvis was silent for a moment. "I'm afraid the surge has also destroyed my sensors in the tower, sir," he said. "I have no way of knowing."
"Dammit," Tony said, turning back to the group. "Ok, guys, we need to get back and check on our friends. Thor, take these guys up to medical and check on Steve and Jess. I'll head back down to the basement to look for Peter."
Logan snarled at him. "I'm coming with you," he said.
Tony held up a hand. "You can't," he said, "It's too dangerous, even for you. There's a ton of radiation down there right now."
"I'm not worried about getting microwaved, Stark," Logan replied.
"You should be," Tony said. "I honestly think if there's anything on this earth that could kill you, it's this stuff."
Logan growled again, but went back over to stand next to Thor, who spun Mjolnir in a circle over his head, creating a wind tunnel that carried the group back to the skyscraper. Tony waited a moment, then shot off the rooftop, electing to head for the basement from the ground floor.
He walked into the lobby, which was for once empty, and stopped for a moment in front of the statue he'd had made of the new Avengers team, where Cap stood in the center, his shield raised high, Iron Man and Thor on either side of him. Hulk loomed behind the trio, hunched over, his arms at forty-five degree angles to almost encompass the rest of the team. Luke Cage and Iron Fist stood to Iron Man's left, Danny in a martial arts stance, and Luke's arms crossed over his chest. Hawkeye and Black Widow were to Thor's right, the archer with a nocked arrow and the spy with her pistols drawn. Standing before Thor was Mockingbird, her escrima sticks at the ready, and in front of Iron Man was Wolverine, crouched, his claws extended and his face vicious.
But what caught Tony's eye was Captain Marvel, which Tony had been grateful to Carol that she'd told him about the costume change before he'd commissioned the statue, flying right over Hulk's head, the stone trail left in her wake still somehow dramatic. And Spider-Man, crouching in front of Cap next to Spider-Woman, his hand extended in his classic web shooting gesture, as though any second the viewer's eyes would be covered in webbing. Tony could just imagine what Peter would say if it were real. Hey, man, the gallery's free. Move along so somebody else can get a look.
Tony Stark was not a religious man. But as he walked away from the statue toward the stairs, he said a silent prayer, asking that his friends be alright. Not just because he wanted them to be alive, but because he didn't want to walk past that statue every day and have to apologize for failing them.
XXXXXX
Carol awoke in what she thought was a war zone. Stretched out before her was a mass of concrete rubble and smashed technology. She reached her hands out, grabbing the edges of the metal chamber she was in, and found them to be covered in webbing. As she looked out at the tank itself, she was reminded of a story Peter had told her where he'd been so badly injured at one point that he'd wrapped himself in some kind of cocoon to escape death and emerged fully healed. She smiled at the comparison.
Suddenly her memories came flooding back to her; where she was, why she'd been in that chamber, what had happened just before she lost consciousness. She remembered power, almost as much power as she'd had as Binary, but it was too much, she felt like everything was going to blast through her, like she was going to burst; she remembered Peter, right in front of her, saying something, his voice drowned out by the rush of energy. She saw the doors closing over her again, heard Peter's voice, heard herself screaming, then the energy, exploding out of her, so much she knew it would be all of her, everything she had, and Peter…
Peter.
"Peter?" she called, looking around the room again, this time scanning for signs of him. At first, all she noticed was rubble, the ruined remains of the control panel they had been using to turn on the radiation, but then she saw a round crater in the back wall, like something had struck it, and she looked down to see the chamber doors lying on the ground, hidden by a few rocks.
She flew out of the chamber, and took a second to register that she was flying. He'd done it. She knew there would be tests, things that would need be looked at to make sure there didn't need to be further treatments, but in her heart she knew. She was herself again. She could soar the skies, break the sound barrier, fly to the moon and beyond if she wanted.
All thanks to Peter.
She floated over to the pile of rubble, moved some of the rocks out of the way and gasped.
The metal doors were bent backwards and singed, obviously by the explosion, and thin strands of webbing wisped from them like tattered curtains in a haunted mansion. Behind the doors, she saw Peter's hand, what remained of his Spider-Man costume.
And blood. God, there was so much blood.
"Peter!" she screamed, lifting the ruined metal and tossing it aside. His body was bent in a horrible shape, crooked and twisted; blood was rolling out of his left arm, and his nose, but Carol couldn't figure out where so much had come from. At least until she lifted him off the ground, where she found his back filled with shrapnel, shards of sharp concrete that had stabbed into his body when the force of the explosion threw him into the wall. "Peter, can you hear me? Are you alright?"
He didn't respond. She wanted him to lift his head, give her that damn smirk she hadn't seen in so long, and say something irritatingly childish. She wanted his eyes to open. She wanted to crack a joke to him about how bad his hair looked, even though, caked with blood as it was, it somehow still looked fantastic. She wanted to feel him breathe. She wanted to hear him say her name.
She wanted…
"God, what a mess," she heard Tony's voice echo in the basement, his armor crunching over debris. "Peter!" he called.
"Tony, over here!" she said, floating upward to rise over the dust.
"Carol?" Tony cried out in surprise, flying up to meet her. "You're alive? You're flying? I can't believe…"
His voice trailed off as he looked at Peter's body. "We need to get him to medical," Carol said, turning away from Tony to fly up the staircase.
"Wait," Tony said, following after her. "The explosion knocked out all the electrical equipment in the building. Medical's just going to be a sterile bedroom right now, if it's even that."
Carol shot up the hole in the stairwell, and Tony flew next to her, having to get close in order to avoid hitting the steps' stone partition. "Well don't we have generators or something?" she asked, not bothering to take her eyes off the numbers at the exits.
"The surge fried the machines, Carol, it didn't just turn off the power," Tony said. "We literally don't have anything that can help him right now."
She saw the number for the right floor and landed long enough to kick the door down before bolting down the hall. Light fixtures sparked overhead as she flew, the shattered white glass of their bulbs littering the hardwood. She could hear Tony jetting behind her, but she couldn't bring herself to slow down. Turning the corner, she almost slammed right into Thor, who was standing outside a massive hole in the wall of the medical wing.
"Carol!" the thunder god said, turning to her. "It is wonderful to see you returned to health, my friend. Are you well?"
"I'm feeling ok, Thor, but he's not," she replied, raising Peter's body slightly. "I need to get him in there."
She stepped around him, and unexpectedly walked into a room full of Avengers.
"Carol!" Jessica cried, rushing over to her best friend and hugging with all her strength. "Oh, my God, I thought you were dead!"
Logan clapped a hand on her shoulder. "Nice to see you walking around, Danvers," he said.
Several of the other took steps forward before she held Peter aloft again. "Guys, not that I'm not appreciative, but how are you missing the dying Spider-Man in my arms?"
"God, it's either one or the other of you, isn't it?" Bruce said, pulling a new shirt over his head as he walked into the room. "Put him down on the bed over here."
"I can't," Carol said. She lifted his body, bringing his head into her shoulder. If it weren't for the metallic smell of the blood, the burnt hair and cloth, the singed skin, she would have sworn there was a hint of cologne somewhere around his neck.
Bruce ran his hands through his hair and groaned. "I don't need to get any more agitated, I'm just coming down," he said, "But damn, that's… that's a lot of shrapnel."
"Yes, it is," Carol said, her voice rising in frustration, "So can you start trying to get them out of him, please?"
Clint and Jessica pulled a bed over to where they were standing. "Lay him down on his side," Bruce said. "I'll see what I can do. Do we have any working equipment in here? Anything that wasn't plugged in? Anything that runs on a battery?"
The Avengers started searching the room while Carol laid Peter down on the bed, brushing her hand against his as she let him go.
His fingers stuck.
Very few members of the team knew that Peter's adhesive abilities required conscious effort, but Carol was one of them. "Peter?" she whispered, leaning in close to his face.
She heard him breathing now, so close to him, but it was ragged and shallow, uneven and difficult. "Y-You're…" he managed to say, "Alive. It… worked."
"Yes, it worked, Peter," she said. "You did it."
Someone pulled an oxygen mask over his face, and Natasha attached a heart monitor to his fingertip. Carol heard Bruce ask about the X-Ray, something about needing to see if any of the shrapnel was embedded beneath his skin, but she wasn't really paying attention. She saw Peter's eyes flutter open, bloodshot and darkened.
"Peter, I'm okay," she said, putting a hand on his cheek. "You need to let yourself rest, now."
His lips curled up beneath the clear plastic of the mask. "I… just wanted to see you," he whispered. "Make sure you were better…"
Bruce hadn't been paying attention to them, hadn't noticed that Peter was awake, and so grabbed a pair of tongs and pulled the largest piece of concrete from Peter's back.
The man cried out, and instinctively turned his body over, trying to protect his back with the bed, but this pierced many of the shrapnel shards into him further. He would have screamed if he hadn't started coughing up blood.
"Peter!" Carol said, gripping his hand and turning him back over. The sheen of red on the bedsheets glistened in the scant light passing through the window. His heart monitor started racing, then slowed down as Peter lost consciousness.
"Ok, everybody out!" Bruce called. He pointed to Tony, who was still in his armor, and said, "You stay, and get that crap off, we're gonna need your actual hands. And I know he can't perform it anymore, but I almost wanna call Strange and get him down here, just for expertise."
"Everybody includes you, Carol," Jessica said, grabbing her best friend by the arm.
She didn't move. Her fingers gripped tight to his, and she could feel her eyes getting hot, even saw little wisps of steam rising from where they evaporated her tears.
Jessica leaned down to where Carol was sitting next to Peter's bed. "We're not doing any good here. We should let the scientists have their space."
"I'm not leaving him," Carol whispered, carefully pronouncing each word so she couldn't be misunderstood. "He stayed with me, all that time. I'm not leaving him."
Jessica grabbed her friend's other hand. "He was here when he could be, yeah," she said. "But he was gone when he had to be. When he was in his lab, he knew that's where he would be helping you the most. That's what you need to do now."
Stephen Strange appeared in the room in a flash of purple light, and walked over to the bed. "By the Vishanti," he said, turning to Tony and Bruce. "We'll need to sterilize ourselves before we start operating." The doctors all walked to the sinks in unison, Strange conjuring several globes of light to substitute for the destroyed lighting in the room.
Carol rose from her seat and leaned over Peter's head, kissing his temple. "You're gonna be alright," she whispered to him. She took her hand from his hand brushed some of his hair, cracking it apart from where it was stuck together with his blood. "Strange is here, now, you're gonna be alright."
Jessica grabbed her again, and they walked toward the exit, past Doctor Strange, who was still washing his hands. Carol clapped him on the back as they walked out the giant hole in the wall. "Help him, Doctor," she said.
"We'll do everything we can, Carol," he said, drying his hands with a towel. Suddenly his head snapped up, realizing who he'd just spoken to. "Carol?!" he called, but they were gone.
XXXXXX
After a stop off at Carol's quarters so she could change out of her torn and tattered costume, Jessica walked Carol to the meeting room, knowing that her friend didn't want to go through the questioning she would receive from the rest of the team. They sat in chairs next to each other at the large round table, and a few seconds of silence passed between them before Jessica threw her arms around Carol's shoulders. "I swear, I thought you weren't gonna make it out of this one," she said.
Carol hugged her friend right back. "Hey, I'm tougher than I look," she said, smiling into the woman's shoulder.
Jessica squeezed, then leaned back against her chair. "You know that didn't have much to do with it this time," she said.
Carol turned her head, looking out the glass door and walls surrounding the meeting room. Shards of white fluorescent glass covered every inch of the floors, and the large flat-screen televisions Tony had put into the walls to constantly show the news from around the world had exploded outward, looking like shattered mirrors in an evil queen's castle. "I know," she said, sighing. "I just wish there were something I could do for him now."
"Carol, you're doing it," Jessica said, leaning forward. "You're alive. That's all he wanted. He wanted his cure to work and for you to be safe. That's it."
She threw a hand in the air, waving Jessica off. "So... what? I'm alive and cured, he can die happy?"
Jessica's mouth said her next words before her brain could stop her. "Honestly, yes."
Carol stood and started walking around the circle of the table, dodging the glass on the floor. She made it to the other side before speaking. "That's ridiculous," she said finally, adding a scoff for emphasis. "He's got his aunt, his work at Horizon, being Spider-Man…"
"Carol!" Jessica shouted, cutting her friend off. She raised her palms in front of her, calming herself, then continued. "Do you have any idea what he went through? Just because he had a flicker of hope for something that might save your life?"
"I…" Carol opened her mouth to speak, then closed it when she realized she had nothing to say. "No, not really. I mean, he fought Doom, I know that."
"Sit," Jessica said, and Carol followed orders, pulling out the chair in front of her. "He found a vault, in Doom's basement," Jessica continued, starting a slow walk around the circumference of the table. "Full of contingency plans. For all of us."
Carol swallowed.
"In addition to those, the vault was guarded by an army of Doombots, the Thor clone Tony made during the Registration Act, a half-complete Ultron and a robot that could pull weapons out of the time-stream like Kang." Jessica stopped next to Carol, placed her palms on the table, and leaned down to eye level with her friend. "Oh, did I forget to mention the giant Doombot head that was powered by a Cosmic Cube?"
Carol felt her palms get sweaty. God, just the idea of it terrified her.
"He destroyed it," Jessica said, sitting down next to her. "The whole thing. All the contingency plans, all the tech, all the research. He probably saved all of our lives."
Carol looked down at the table.
"And after that, he went and kicked the holy dog crap out of Doom," Jessica said. "Cap told me Peter beat him bloody; broke one of his legs, ripped off that metal mask and pulped his face." She watched Carol look up from the table to the ceiling, running her fingers through her short blond hair. When her friend put her hand back down, Jessica grabbed it, and Carol turned to her. "Why would he do all that?" Jessica asked.
Carol was silent for a few moments, her eyes darting around the room, like an animal. "I don't know," she said, finally, looking back in Jessica's eyes. "Because we're Avengers, teammates. He'd do that for any one of us."
Jessica shook her head slowly. "You know it's more than that, don't you?" she asked, her voice calm, almost matronly.
Carol shrugged. "Well, I do trust him, obviously," she said. "I asked him to look into this whole thing with me…"
"Yes!" Jessica said. "There's a good place to start. Why did you ask him? He's a genius, yes, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, but you had to have known that Reed would probably have been the best choice, given his history with the Kree. So why Peter?"
Carol shook her head, her eyes on the symbol engraved in the table. "Like I said, I trust him. We're friends." She looked back to Jessica. "I just wanted to give him some… encouragement, I guess. He's always so down on himself."
"But isn't that part of his charm?" Jessica asked. "His self-deprecating sense of humor?"
Carol turned her body, facing her friend. "No, that's where so many people get him wrong," she said. "The only time he's not joking is when he's putting himself down." Her eyes turned back to the table, and she ran another hand through her hair.
Jessica couldn't tell if Carol had noticed how sad her voice had turned. "So you risked your life, just to boost Peter's self-esteem?"
Carol gave her a sideways glance. "I wasn't really risking my life," she said. Her mouth turned up in a smile. "I knew he'd come through for me."
Jessica smiled right back at her. "I know you can't see your face right now, but if you could…" she trailed off.
"What?" Carol asked.
Jessica shrugged. "I just don't see you smile like that very often," she said.
"Hey, I smile," Carol said, crossing her arms. "I smile all the time."
"Yeah, there just always happens to be a spider in the room," Jessica said.
Carol rose from the table and hugged her arms together. A few moments of silence passed as she walked around the other side of the table, a slight frown in her lips. "I think," she said, stopping in front of the glass door, "I'm gonna head to the common room. I'd like to see everybody."
"Carol," Jessica said as her friend put her hand on the door handle. "The man is in love with you."