Title: Resurrection, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 12/13
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony. Various canon ships. Sharon/Winter Soldier, for your daily dosage of spy/assassin hotness.
Warnings: Denial fic. Blatant shipper fic. Captain America and Iron Man in a romantic relationship. One non-canonical het pairing. A dire lack of sex. Terrifying amounts of snuggling and angst.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. Also, some of the dialogue in chapter five was taken from Brian Michael Bendis's Civil War: The Confession. No profit is being made off of this derivative work. We're paid in love, people.
Note: For a rundown of where this fic departs from current continuity, see the notes at the end of chapter one. Familiarity with the events of Captain America #25 and Civil War is encouraged.
Again, thank you to angelofharmony and tavella for the wonderful beta job.
Chapter Twelve
Sunlight shone off the smooth green water of the East River in a dazzling glare, framed and reflected by the smooth glass wall of Manhattan's skyline. Behind them, the pyre of the Peking lent everything a reddish tint.
The Mandarin was turned away from them, feet resting lightly on the water, standing calmly in the middle of the brilliance.
He always had had a flare for the melodramatic. Giant castles with trapdoors, torture chambers with rusty manacles, massive killer robots, huge airships shaped like Fin Fang Foom…
/Watch out for his right ring finger,/ Tony warned Carol as they drew closer. /That one's the disintegration ring. If he hits you with it full on, you won't even get a chance to feel any pain./
/Great. Any other helpful hints?/
/The one on his left ring finger gives him limited mind-control abilities. Try not to get within ten feet of him./
/I could be fighting Doom, but no, I had to go for the megalomaniac with a jewelry fetish./ Carol pulled away in a burst of speed, leaving Tony in her wake.
He increased the power to his boot jets, matching her speed once more. She'd needed to know what the Mandarin could do, but now that Tony had given her a reason to be afraid of him, Carol was going in guns blazing, all reckless fighter pilot machismo.
The Mandarin turned to meet them, left hand coming up. A blast of flame shot from it, aimed directly between Tony and Carol. Tony broke right, Carol went left, and the flame sizzled between them, a line of steam rising from the water beneath it.
"Fire again?" He broadcast the words through the armor's speaker system, making sure they were loud enough to carry. "Lacks imagination."
"That's all he's got?" Carol called back. "I can throw more energy than that."
The Mandarin lifted his right hand, and held it motionless in the air. "I have waited for you to come and face me for a fortnight," he sneered, "and now, when the invincible Iron Man finally dares to come before me, he does so hiding behind a woman." He gestured with his upraised hand, and a column of water rose from the river, wrapping itself around Carol and slamming her into the river's surface, smaller tentacles of water rising up to pull her under.
Tony lifted his own hands and sent twin blasts of repulsor energy at the Mandarin. Predictably, he dodged, but he lost his grip on Carol in the process.
Carol shot back into the air, shaking her wet hair out of her face. "All right, now I'm really mad. I'm mutated enough without drinking that crap."
"That is the best you can muster?" The Mandarin was facing Tony again, ignoring Carol completely. "I had heard that your powers had been vastly increased, as mine have. I had hoped you would finally prove a worthy foe." He waved his right hand again.
"You say that every time," Tony managed, throwing himself to one side just in time to dodge a blast of ring energy. The pressure of the migraine he'd been fighting since this morning -- well, actually, since yesterday morning -- flared, and he blinked spots of light out of his vision. Twenty yards beyond him, an orange buoy floating in the water disintegrated. He hadn't seen any new powers yet, so chances were this was just standard Mandarin-style arrogance. "Haven't seen you beat me yet."
Taking advantage of the Mandarin's preoccupation with Tony, Carol dove at him from behind, fists out in front of her -- and the Mandarin, without turning, held his right hand out behind him and hit her dead center with a force beam. Carol went cartwheeling back through the air, halting herself only a few feet away from the burning ship.
"This time, I will not fail. You have cost me my rightful empire one too many times, and I have had years to meditate on the appropriate method for your demise." The Mandarin shifted his weight slightly, and the skirts of his long, embroidered robe swayed with the motion, revealing a patch of grey-white ice beneath his feet.
Okay, clever use of the ice ring, he'd give him that. Tony had never really believed the bastard could walk on water anyway. He sent a tightly focused beam of infrared heat at the Mandarin's feet. The ice melted away in seconds, and the Mandarin aimed his left hand downward. Tony could see the change in the air currents on the armor's sensor read out as he used the vortex ring to propel himself into the air, the hem of his robe clinging to his ankles, dripping.
/He's got no stability flying this way./ Tony sent to Carol. /On three?/
/Screw three. Now./
Carol flew at the Mandarin from the left, and Tony simultaneously came at him from the right; all it would take was one good hit from either of them, and the Mandarin would be swimming in the--
A force beam slammed into Tony's right shoulder, spinning him completely around. It was like being punched by the Hulk.
Shoulder now throbbing in counterpoint to his head, Tony righted himself to see Carol, totally encased in ice, fall back into the water with a splash. After years spent rotting in an eight-by-eight prison cell, a normal man might have gotten rusty, but the Mandarin was just as fast as ever. Insanity clearly had perks.
"I expected you to come to me after I destroyed your flying stronghold," the Mandarin was raising both hands toward Tony now, long white hair floating around his face in the artificial wind, "but it seems you are a coward after all, hiding and licking your wounds while my men prepared to make my glorious empire rise to power again."
"Again? You never had an empire." Tony executed a half roll, and circled the Mandarin, edging gradually closer. The water around them both was empty -- no sign of Carol. Ice floated. Where the hell was Carol?
"I am the direct descendant of the great Khans. The last descendant, thank to your interference. China is mine by blood-right, but now I shall never see my son sit at my right hand in the Forbidden City." The Mandarin spun around in midair, then darted forward, lighting-quick, to seize Tony by the throat.
The Mandarin had always been quick, always possessed of martial arts training, but he'd never been this fast before. And though he might have been able to make himself levitate, he'd certainly never been able to fly. Tony instinctively tried to reach up to pull the Mandarin's hand away, but his arms were suddenly too heavy to lift, held in place by a familiar gravitational field.
"Temugin was my son. He was to be my heir, my strong right arm. You drew him away from his destiny. You tainted his ideals. If not for your meddling, he would never have died."
The gravitational pull on Tony's armor was getting stronger; even through the armor, he could feel the increased pressure. Below him, the surface of the water had flattened under the weight, unmoved by the winds the Mandarin was using to hold himself aloft. Tony struggled uselessly, resisting the impulse to simply give in to the heavy weight, to just let the Mandarin crush him. He was already so tired, and the force dragging against him made every aborted movement infinitely more exhausting, but he had no idea what had happened to Carol, and anyway, he couldn't leave her to face this alone.
"I wanted to take everything from you, the same way you took everything from me." The Mandarin's voice was eerily calm, almost serene. "I planned to strip your comrades and vassals away from you one by one, but you seem to have done a fine job of that yourself."
One truth amidst all the hackneyed rhetoric. If driving everyone away had kept them from being targets for the Mandarin, maybe something good had come out of the mess Tony had made of things after all.
"I had something truly special in mind for that manservant you were so fond of…" Tony's vision swam for a moment, the white and black flashes returning, and then resolving into the sight of Happy, hovering a few feet away. He was wearing Tony's old red-and-gold armor, without the helmet, the way he had been the time the Mandarin had captured him, when he'd gone out of his way to help Tony and ended up paying a predictable price for it.
"…but alas, someone else has already had the pleasure of killing him." The Mandarin closed the fingers of his free hand into a fist, and the image of Happy dissolved.
Tony had killed Happy, shut down the life support he'd only been on in the first place because he'd had the bad luck to be Tony's friend. It had been easy, with the Extremis. It had also been one of the worst moments of Tony's life, almost as bad as the two months Steve had been dead. Pleasure had never been involved.
The Extremis… Tony had cut all the data feeds he could, all the ones not connected with the armor, but now he could hear the faint buzz of something digital transmitting close by. It was like nothing he'd ever heard before, an alien hum from ten different datafeeds.
It was the rings. It had to be. Regardless of what the Mandarin had claimed about them over the years, they were alien tech, and technology could be controlled.
Tony submerged himself in the familiar blackness of the Extremis, isolating the ten separate sources of the signal and mentally reaching for them.
Bad, bad idea. Trying to control the rings was like grabbing the live end of an arc welder in his bare hands. The world whited out, all other sensory data obliterated by the blinding pain in his skull. Tony grasped desperately at the rings' energy signals, but his concentration was shattered, and they slid away from him.
The Mandarin released his grip on Tony's throat, and he fell like a rock, bringing his boot jets back on line just in time to catch himself a foot above the water. His nose was bleeding again; he could feel the warm wetness of the blood inside his helmet.
He blinked up at the Mandarin through still-blurred vision, and had just enough time to notice the startled expression on his face before the Mandarin raised his right hand and lightning shot from all five fingers.
The streams of electricity hit dead in the center of the armor's chestplate, and Tony's vision went white again.
Military radio protocol. Tony had told Steve that he loved him, was going out to fight one of the most powerful people he'd ever faced off against, thinking that he was very probably going to die, and the best Steve had been able to give him was military radio protocol.
Why hadn't he been able to think of anything to say? 'You're my best friend,' or 'don't you dare get yourself killed.' Even, 'I'll see you tonight,' would have been better. Something to let Tony know that he was not expendable, since that seemed to be such a hard concept for him to grasp.
Something to let Tony know how important he was to Steve.
Steve stared out the car window at the wide swath of trees stretched out beneath them. They were over Central Park now, the Conservatory Pond flashing in the sunlight as they flew over it.
Then the mortar round hit. The impact spun the car sideways through the air, its entire frame shuddering. Steve was thrown forward, catching himself on the back of the driver's seat. Sam slammed into his side, accidentally elbowing Steve in the ribs, and Redwing made an angry sound and fluttered his wings frantically.
"Fuck!" Sharon yelled. "We lost one of the wheels. The car's going to crash. I'm going to have to try landing further into the park, or we'll hit something." The flying cars needed all four of their wheels in order to provide balanced thrust -- with even one wheel gone, the car would be like a helicopter with its tail rotor shot away, unable to stabilize itself or control its flight. "Sam!" Sharon snapped.
"Right." Sam kicked the passenger side door open, grabbed Steve, and hauled him out of the car into the air. Steve only just managed to snatch up the strap of his artist's portfolio before he was dangling in midair, Sam's fingers cutting off the circulation in his left arm.
Sam dived downwards, letting Steve go about ten feet from the ground. Steve twisted his body, landing on his shoulder and rolling to his feet. Sam dropped to the ground beside him.
Above them, the car was spiraling through the air, trailing smoke from the back fender. As Steve watched, it hit the trees, crashing through the canopy and slamming into the ground. Sharon and Bucky bailed out, diving for cover behind a scattering of large rocks, and then the car exploded.
Steve and Sam hit the dirt, pieces of metal and glass raining down around them. "Where the hell did Red Skull get artillery?" Sam shouted.
Sharon picked herself up off the ground, brushing bark and dirt from her hair. "Dickstein is on a military procurement committee," she shouted back. Beside her, Bucky rolled to his feet in one smooth movement, still clutching his sniper rifle.
"Figures," Sam muttered, dropping his forehead back to the dirt for a moment. "I really hate that man." Redwing circled down to land on the ground next to him, cocking his head to one side and eyeing Sam with what Steve would swear was concern.
"I wanted to kill him," Bucky said, "but you were-"
"Bucky," Steve said. He rolled his eyes, and stood. He was going to pretend that had been a joke.
They were in mid-Central Park, just on the edges of the Ramble. This part of the park was mostly un-landscaped, full of rocks, fallen trees, and overgrown underbrush.
Steve unfastened the portfolio and pulled out his shield, sliding his right arm through the straps, and then Red Skull's minions burst out of the trees.
They had been lying in wait, of course. Red Skull had probably detected the car's approach through the SHIELD satellites.
"Where did he find this many Nazis these days?" Bucky asked rhetorically, sighting down the barrel of his rifle at a man with silver SS pins on his collar.
"Illinois." Sharon drew her own gun, swinging around to cover Bucky's six.
One of the uniformed men opened fire at Steve, and he threw up his shield to block the shot. Bucky and Sharon fired return shots simultaneously. One bullet took the man through the right shoulder; the other caught him dead between the eyes, the back of his skull disappearing in a mist of blood. Bucky was good at head shots.
He'd always been good at head shots, something which never failed to trouble Steve. No one should have to be that good at killing as young as Bucky had been. And it was Red Skull and others like him who had made that necessary.
Then everyone was shooting. Steve threw himself to the side, rolling and coming up with his shield in front of him.
There were about fifteen of them, Steve estimated, wearing reproductions of black SS uniforms, and armed with M16s. With that many bullets in the air, he couldn't throw his shield without making a target of himself.
Behind him, Sharon and Bucky were returning fire. Sam had dropped to one knee, one armed raised, holding one of his hard-light wings in front of himself as a shield. Redwing had taken off again, diving at the nearest minion with his claws extended.
There was a flash of red at the tree line of the Ramble. Steve half-turned and saw Red Skull standing knee deep in underbrush, a heavy mask obscuring Lukin's features and lending him the familiar skeletal visage that Steve knew and hated. Red Skull was calmly aiming a Luger pistol at Sharon and Bucky.
Steve's shouted warning came simultaneously with the sound of the shot. Bucky staggered, clutching at his left thigh, blood visible between his metal fingers.
Steve didn't actually remember flinging himself to his feet; the next thing he knew, he was halfway across the clearing, almost on Red Skull.
Red Skull snapped off a shot in Steve's direction, then turned and ran into the shadowy depths of the Ramble. Steve followed, the sounds of the fire-fight fading as the trees closed around them.
Without stopping, Red Skull half-turned and fired another bullet at Steve. The bullet deflected off Steve's shield with a clang, and Red Skull dove off the path and into the underbrush.
Damn it; with all of the trees around it was too closed in for him to get a clear throw at Red Skull. In such close quarters, his shield was nearly useless, good only for blocking.
It was late enough into spring that all of the trees were in leaf; it wasn't the thick canopy of late summer, but it still formed a wall of pale green all about Steve, obscuring his vision. As he ran, he caught flashes of red and black ahead of him. With all of those deep, unnatural colors, Red Skull made a perfect target, if only Steve could get a clear line of sight and enough room to throw his shield.
Another bullet whistled past Steve's head, tearing the left wing of his cowl. He jerked his head back, and the second bullet drew a hot line of blood along his hairline. If he hadn't moved, it would have taken him right through the forehead, just like Bucky's headshot had done to Red Skull's man.
Steve dodged behind a large tree and leaned his head back against the rough bark, closing his eyes for a moment until the brief flare of dizziness went away.
Red Skull was finished after today. Steve wasn't letting him escape again, and all the bullets in the world weren't going to stop him.
He didn't feel nervous or scared, only slightly numb, everything focused on the task at hand. He'd been brought back, and maybe it was for a reason after all.
The Red Skull had to die, and if Steve had to go down with him to make sure that happened...
He took a deep breath, readying himself to resume the chase, and then the headset he'd forgotten he was wearing crackled to life, and the sound of screaming echoed in his ears.
Steve had known Tony's voice before he'd ever seen his face; it was the first thing he'd heard when he'd woken up from the ice. He would know it anywhere, even through the crackle of the Extremis, distorted by pain.
It took a hell of a lot to make Tony scream like that.
The sound cut off as abruptly as it had begun, the line going dead again.
Damn it, damn it, damn it. He'd just gotten Tony back, he wasn't going to lose this chance with him -- not to the Mandarin, not to Tony's own problems, and sure as hell not to Red Skull. Red Skull had taken enough from all of them.
He couldn't lose Tony, and Sam, Sharon and Bucky shouldn't have to lose him again. If the Red Skull killed him, he'd never learn what had just happened, whether Tony was all right. And if Tony lived through this fight and Steve didn't…
Even if Steve succeeded in killing him, if he died in the process, Red Skull would still win.
Red Skull wasn't going to win anymore.
The pain was excruciating, white-hot and all around him. With the current running through him, Tony couldn't move, couldn't even scream, except inside his head. Steve… he thought. Inside the armor, his back arched, muscles seizing and locking. Everything hurt, even the inside of his head, lit on fire by the feedback crackling through the armor's systems via the Extremis.
The current stopped abruptly, dropping from mind-numbing to bearable in a split second. Tony hung in the air, gasping for breath. He had a communications line open, he realized, must have accessed it accidentally when the feedback started. Tony closed the line off and blinked until his vision came back.
Carol, dripping wet, was flexing her right hand, a grim smile on her lips, while the Mandarin doubled over, also gasping. "You dare lay hands on me?" he demanded, voice breathless. He thrust his right hand out towards her, and a broad beam of laser light hit Carol in the chest.
It was the wrong hand. He was using the wrong hand. It had been the wrong hand when he'd used the lightning ring on Tony just now, too. The lightning ring was on the left one…
"Big mistake, buddy," Carol smirked. Her skin had begun to glow red, the incandescent flames of her old Binary power flickering to life around her. She dodged a blast from his force ring and hit him again, catching him in the torso once more.
With Carol charged up to this level of power, it should have broken him in half. Instead, it barely seemed to wind him. He hit her with another force blast, this time from both hands, and she was thrown backwards again, a swirl of wind holding her in place.
"Again, you let a woman fight your battles for you. You disappoint me, Iron Man. I had hoped for a more satisfying fight, something fitting for our last battle."
Tony blinked spots from his vision, and frowned, not really hearing the Mandarin's words. He could still hear the discordant hum of the rings, dominated by a loud buzzing that must be the vortex ring, the one he was using to hold Carol and to keep himself in the air. The signal wasn't coming from the Mandarin's hands, but from somewhere inside his body.
"… bomb has shut down Asia's major airport. Once my loyal servants bomb China's rail centers and highways, the Chinese army will have no way to mobilize and fight me."
The rings were inside him now, were a part of him, the way Tony's armor was now a part of Tony. If he could do something to them, get at them with the Extremis, the Mandarin should be able to feel the backlash.
"My armies can march through the countryside unopposed, and all of Asia will kneel to me, as is my right."
All ten at once were too much; he couldn't handle the strain of the alien data, and he didn't have the time -- or the physical reserves left -- to properly hack them. But maybe he could manage to establish a link with one of them. Whatever he did, it would have to be sheer brute force, something crude but effective. When the Mandarin had hit him with the lightning ring, he'd been able to feel the feedback from his armor. If he could get the Mandarin to use it on him again, could tap into it to start a feedback loop… If he could establish an uplink through the ring, he could channel the power through his body and back into the Mandarin.
There was a good chance doing it would kill him, but if he died taking out the Mandarin, no one could fault him for that. He'd known going into this fight that he might not be coming out of it. It might even be easier this way, for everyone.
He'd never get to see Steve again, but at least he wouldn't be letting anyone else down.
The Mandarin smiled, raising his hands again. "And you, my greatest enemy, will be a thorn in my side no longer."
Tony hit him with a repulsor blast.
The Mandarin snarled, that eerie calm finally breaking, and dropped the vortex around Carol. One of the ring signals flared, and the Mandarin threw twin force blasts at Tony.
Tony threw himself sideways, managing to dodge one of the blasts. The second one hit him in the left side, so hard he felt ribs crack. Tony blacked out for a second, but the armor kept him in the air, kept him moving.
He shook his head to clear it. "You'll have to do better than that to get past my armor," he gasped, ribs protesting as he maneuvered himself subtly closer to the Mandarin. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Carol doing the same. /Wait 'til he zaps me,/ he sent to her. /Then give him your best shot./
/Don't I always?/
Tony reached out again with the Extremis, probing at the rings. When the Mandarin took a shot at him again, one of them would register a power surge a split second beforehand; he would have to be ready. "Even your lightning ring barely touched me," he sneered. Knowing the Mandarin, that would be all it took; he could just wipe Tony out with the disintegrator, but then he wouldn't get to watch him suffer.
One of the rings flared up -- please, please let it be the right one -- and Tony opened the connection to it a split second before the lightning hit him. He'd thought he was prepared for the shock this time around, but it was every bit as excruciating.
Electricity had been his lifeline once, back when he'd needed it to power his chestplate and keep his heart beating. Those smaller, controlled currents had been painful, but nothing like this. He could still sense the ring, the pain from the Extremis blurring into the sheer physical pain of the electrical current until they were indistinguishable.
He couldn't breathe, body seizing again… If he lost consciousness now, he'd lose the connection, and it would all be for nothing.
He could feel the current tearing through him, through his armor and back across the link into the ring. It was working. He couldn't breathe, vision blacked out, but over the scream of feedback in the armor's systems, he could hear the Mandarin yelling, shock and outrage coloring his voice. It was hurting him, too.
He knew when Carol made her move only because the feedback loop was finally broken.
Tony sobbed for breath, only the armor's autopilot function keeping him in the air. Couldn't black out. If the Mandarin hadn't gone down…
"Tony?" Carol's voice, from close by.
Tony blinked, and the black and white flashes in his vision resolved into Carol, hovering a few feet away, with the limp form of the Mandarin dangling from one hand like an afterthought. "What the hell did you do?" she demanded.
"Feedback loop," he gasped, struggling to get the words out.
"Well, whatever it was, he's down for the count. We'd better get back to shore before you are, too."
Tony followed back towards the shoreline, literally on autopilot. If he attempted to fly and land manually, he'd just end up crashing into the dock; he was too exhausted to judge distances properly anymore.
The Peking was still burning, its masts and rigging now completely gone. A group of soot-stained school children was standing a safe distance away on the dock, clustered around Simon. "This is the best fieldtrip ever!" a little girl announced loudly, gazing at Simon with seven-year-old adoration. A second, smaller group was clustered around Jessica Drew, who was wearing the suspicious expression of one who suspected small children were poisonous.
On the other end of the boardwalk, Iron Fist and Luke were standing in the center of a ring of unconscious ninjas. Luke's shirt was shredded, hanging off him in rags.
Carol landed in front of them, absently kicking a ninja out of the way. "They give you any trouble?" she asked, nodding at the unconscious men on the ground.
"Naw," said Luke. "Their kung fu was weak."
Tony hit the ground beside Carol, and his side flared with pain at the impact. He shut off the autopilot and immediately fell to his knees, catching himself with his hands -- more fun with cracked ribs -- and shook his head, trying to clear the dull ringing in his ears.
"Tony?" Carol asked. "Are you okay?"
"I'll be fine," he assured her. "My superhuman powers of denial will get me back to the Helicarrier." That was what the armor's autopilot was designed for.
"I can make throwing stars explode!" Iron Fist announced cheerfully. Tony looked up to see him wavering slightly on his feet.
"What's wrong with him?" Carol asked.
Luke snorted. "Mini kung fu Jesus here used up all his chi on the exploding throwing stars."
Iron Fist grinned. "I've been trying to get that to work for a month." He wobbled again, and Luke grabbed him by the elbow.
"Yeah, whatever. What kind of food you want?"
Carol turned to Simon, who had broken free of his elementary school admirers and was walking towards them, trailed by an irritated-looking Jessica. "If you love me," she said, "you will tell me there is nothing wrong with you."
"There's nothing wrong with me," Simon repeated obediently. "Why?"
"What?" Jessica asked caustically. "No concern for me?"
Carol smirked. "You can take care of yourself."
Tony let his head hang forward again, aching in every muscle and feeling faintly sick. He closed his eyes, accessing the Extremis to reach for the communications lines and data feeds he'd been running for so long. Fury needed to know--
It was like an ice-pick through the forehead, a sharp stab of blinding pain that threatened to push him over the edge into unconsciousness. Tony dropped the uplink, dropped everything but the armor; he couldn't handle anything else right now, not if he wanted to stay upright. Well, a certain value of upright.
"… Tony?" Carol was speaking, one hand on his shoulder. "Tony, are you-"
"What?" Tony interrupted.
Carol hitched the Mandarin's limp body higher on her shoulder. "The Negative Zone or the Raft?" she asked.
"Raft," Tony said. If it could hold Bullseye, it could hold the Mandarin. The breakout all those months ago had been under extenuating circumstances, and even the Mandarin wasn't worth the precedent re-opening the Negative Zone would set. "Get someone to cut the rings out of him as quickly as possible. Keep him unconscious until then."
"The rings are inside him?" Simon asked. "Wow. There's something disgusting I didn't expect to learn today."
"Right," Carol said. "Simon, you take the walking wounded back to the Helicarrier. Jessica, let's get Mr. Alien Rings to a surgeon."
"I am not wounded," Iron Fist muttered sulkily.
"I don't need an escort, and I'm going nowhere without my kid," Luke added.
"Go home and get Jessica and the baby, then," Tony told him. His head hurt too much to argue. "Then you can all come to back the Helicarrier. Fury's going to need to debrief you." He obviously couldn't use the Extremis right now, and there was no one left here to fight. All that was left was to go back to their main base and wait for Steve.
They'd been past this rock formation once already. Red Skull didn't know where he was going, Steve realized. He was running blind. The Ramble was a tangled mess of paths that looped back on each other, and Red Skull was going in circles.
Steve had run through the Ramble at least once a week when the Avengers Mansion had still been standing. It was only a few blocks away from home, and was an interesting place to run through; he and Clint had come here all the time. Steve knew these trails like the back of his hand. It was his home ground; he had the tactical advantage, and it was time he started using it.
Red Skull crashed through the branches up ahead and dashed across a section of trail. Steve followed, grateful for the boots that gave him footing on the wet leaves littering the edges of the path. As he lunged across the trail after the Red Skull, Still Hunt loomed up in front of him; the big, bronze panther crouched predatorily on a rock, a fahmiliar landmark.
The underbrush was still too dense in this part of the Ramble for him to use his shield properly, and Red Skull was too smart to break cover. But if they kept running in this direction for another quarter-mile, they'd be on top of the Ramble Arch, and on open ground.
Someone crashed through the brush behind him, and Steve spun around, shield up. Sharon was racing after him, gun out, Bucky limping along at her side, followed by a seriously annoyed-looking Sam.
"What the hell, man?" Sam demanded. "What were you thinking, taking off like that?"
"The Skull's men are all down," Sharon said. "A little help might have been nice."
"Red Skull's up ahead," Steve told them. There wasn't time to explain any further. "Follow my lead." He turned to Sam. "Do you know where the Arch is?"
"Yeah," Sam said.
"I need you to circle around behind it. We're going to run Red Skull out onto the bridge, and I want you on the other side."
"Got it." Sam nodded, and disappeared into the trees, Redwing following him overhead.
Satisfied, Steve took off after Red Skull again, Sharon and Bucky on his heels.
Ahead of him, Red Skull splashed through the shallow water of the tiny stream that ran through the Ramble, and scrambled up the opposite bank. Steve smiled grimly and slid down after him, jumping the streambed. He could hear Sharon and Bucky splashing through the ankle-deep water behind him, Bucky cursing in a mix of English and Russian.
When they reached the top of the gentle rise of the embankment, the trees ahead thinned, and Steve could see Red Skull's black uniform through the leaves. Sharon pulled even with Steve, raising her gun, and fired two bullets at Red Skull in rapid succession. Red Skull staggered and fired over his shoulder at them in response; then he resumed running, and was quickly obscured by the trees once more.
It was only a minute before Steve could see light up ahead, through a gap in the trees. They were almost to the Arch.
The loud crack of Red Skull's pistol sounded again, and Bucky stumbled, swearing again.
Steve slowed, turning to him, and Bucky grinned, raising his left hand and wiggling the metal fingers. "Hit me in the arm," he said. "It ricocheted off."
Then they were at the edge of the Arch, Red Skull only a few yards away, in the middle of the span. He spun around, firing at them wildly. Both shots deflected off Steve's shield harmlessly, and he lowered it, stepping out onto the bridge. "Hello, Skull," he said, smirking. "You're out of bullets."
Red Skull was spattered with mud and bleeding from his left arm. He turned to run, desperately trying to fumble more bullets into his gun, and Sam stepped into view on the other end of the bridge. "Going somewhere?" he asked, folding his arms over his chest.
Red Skull stopped in his tracks, pinned between them. He turned back to Steve, finally sliding a new bullet home, and raised his Luger. The crimson skull mask was eerily empty of expression. "Congratulations, Rogers. You have finally managed to run me down, and I shall now have the pleasure of killing you a second time."
There was a harsh screech from up above, and Redwing swooped down out of the sky, slamming into Red Skull's hand. The gun went flying over the side of the Arch, and Redwing soared upwards again, blood dripping from his talons.
Red Skull clutched his wounded hand, swearing in German. "You cannot defeat me, Rogers. I have come back before, and I will do so again."
Bucky stepped forward to flank Steve, cocking his rifle. "Yeah, after I killed you. Take off that stupid mask and fight us in your real face, Lukin."
Red Skull, incredibly, laughed. "But, mein kleiner Soldat, this is my real face. Lukin is dead." He reached inside his uniform tunic and pulled out a silver SS dagger, preparing to throw it at one of them.
Steve had heard enough of Red Skull's ranting to last him a lifetime. It was time to end this.
His shield hit Red Skull in the ribs, the force of the impact knocking him backwards over the edge of the bridge. The shield curved back towards Steve, and he lifted his right hand and plucked it out of the air.
Bucky was already scrambling down the steep embankment, his wounded leg barely hindering him. Steve moved to the edge of the bridge, and looked over.
Red Skull was lying on his back on the bottom of the ravine, thirteen feet below. The red mask had been knocked off by the fall, and was lying beside his head. Steve could tell from the angle he lay at that his back was broken.
Steve shrugged the shield back into place over his shoulder and jumped down after Bucky.
Bucky was crouching over Red Skull, the Luger in his hand. As Steve stepped forward, Red Skull opened his eyes -- Lukin's eyes -- and coughed, whispering something in Russian.
Bucky shot him in the head.
The gunshot echoed through the ravine, and then everything was silent.
"What did he say?" Steve asked, stepping up to stand beside Bucky.
"He said, 'help me.'" Bucky dropped the Luger on the ground beside Lukin's corpse, and Steve stared at the lifeless body, feeling tired and empty.
Sam jumped from the Arch, gliding the few feet to the ravine floor, and Sharon scrambled down the rocky embankment after him. Steve blinked at them, suddenly unable to think of anything to say. His plan hadn't included what was supposed to happen after Red Skull was dead.
Bucky cocked his head to one side, thoughtfully. "I say we burn him."
"You think maybe that's overkill?" Sam asked, in a tone of voice Steve knew he'd used on Wolverine more than few times.
Steve shook his head. "Last time, he came back." Red Skull had been right, up on the arch; Steve had never been able to truly defeat him. He knew better than anyone else that death wasn't necessarily permanent, especially when it came to the Red Skull.
Twenty minutes later, they were at the edge of the park reservoir, all standing around a hastily constructed pyre. While the Ramble had been deserted, probably because of the Nazi's with guns, they had passed a number of people on the larger trails near the reservoir who had looked them askance, including one man who had very obviously been calling the police on his cell phone.
"Why are we doing this again?" Sam asked, staring down at the body where it lay on top of the pile of dry branches.
"Because it will make Steve feel better," Sharon said. She, too, was staring at the body, arms folded across her chest.
"So he can't come back," Bucky said, at the same moment. "This time, my shooting him is going to take."
Sharon's lips twitched, and she held out a hand. "Can I light the matches?"
Steve remained silent, listening to the back-and-forth. This time, Red Skull hadn't won; they had all come through intact. Even Bucky's leg had been only a minor injury, a shallow graze that Sharon had already bound up.
The branches caught slowly, smoking, some of them still damp from all of the recent rain, but eventually the pyre was in flames. The four of them watched it burn in silence for a few minutes, and then Sharon said, softly, "We found out who he was getting his information from. He had a New York congressional representative on his payroll, Joe Dickstein."
Dickstein? "I know that name," Steve said. "Tony was on the phone with him right after we all got back together, when he was trying to get us all amnesty."
"Not surprising," Sam said, in a disgruntled tone of voice. "He's the head of the House Committee on Unregistered Superhuman Activities. The people in charge of Registration."
"And he was working for a terrorist?" No matter how many times Steve learned about some new instance of governmental corruption, it still always filled him with disgust.
Sharon smirked. "That rumbling sound you hear is HUSAC's political credibility crumbling. I'd be surprised if the Registration Act lasts out the summer."
Dickstein was one of Carol's "them," Steve realized. One of the people whom Tony and the pro-registration heroes had been trying to shield them from, the remnants of Project Wideawake who had supposedly wanted to put Peter and Jessica Drew on a lab table. Had Dickstein known who he was getting into bed with, or had he just hated and feared superhumans and mutants so much that he didn't care?
The sun was high in the sky by the time the pyre had burned to embers. Steve watched the coals smolder a dull, malevolent red. He turned away from them, to face the others. "Let's go home."
Bucky had taken his mask off, and looked tired and rumpled and younger than he really ought to. "Where is home?" he asked, rubbing absently at the bandage on his leg.
He had been thinking of the Avengers Mansion, Steve realized. It had been home for so long, and they weren't that far away from it. But it was gone, and his apartment down under the Brooklyn Bridge had been destroyed as well, when Maria Hill's goons had broken in. As long as he had Bucky, Sam, and Sharon, any place would do for the moment. But only if Tony was there, too, and all right.
"The Helicarrier will do for tonight," Sharon said, laying a hand on Bucky's shoulder.
"I'll call Fury and arrange for a pick-up," Bucky said, turning away slightly. He paused, then said, "Sir, this is Barnes. Mission accomplished. Requesting a pick-up for transport to base."
Fury's voice emerged from somewhere, faint and tinny. "Are ya bringin' me his head?"
"Sorry, sir. We already disposed of the body."
"And ya didn't invite me? Well, anyway, I'll send a car for ya at the docks. We're kinda tied up right now."
"Roger. Barnes out."
"Wait," Fury asked. "What happened to the car ya had?"
"Barnes out," Bucky repeated.
"Any suggestions for getting there?" Sam asked after a moment. "Because I can tell you now, no New York cab driver is going to pick up four capes in bloody costumes, especially not when we've got a live animal with us."
"We'll take the subway," Steve said, grinning a little at the expression on Sam's face.
It was a long walk out of the park to the nearest subway station. Once they'd left the reservoir behind, Sharon fell into step beside Steve, taking his arm and drawing him ahead, away from Sam and Bucky, who was limping slightly.
"He told you he loved you," she said quietly. "Didn't he?"
Wait, what? Steve stared at her blankly -- he had been doing that with Sharon a lot, lately -- and finally managed, "How did you-"
Sharon smiled a little, looking almost wistful. "Steve, it's been Tony this and Tony that for as long as I've known you. And those last two months, with the fight over registration... If it hurt you that much when we fought, we would still be together. And anyway," she said, "in the car. I recognized the deer-in-the-headlights look on your face."
"I'm sorry," Steve said softly. It had been years since he and Sharon had really been together, and they had never made any promises to one another, but they had a lot of history with one another, and even if she wasn't the person he wanted to spend his life with, he still loved her.
Sharon looked up at him. "Why?" she asked, frowning.
"Because," Steve stammered, "you, and I, and…"
Sharon smiled again, shaking her head. "I'm sleeping with James."
Steve tripped over a crack in the pavement. "Wait, what?"
"It started while you were…" Sharon trailed off, then began again, "We were both so devastated, and he was there for me. And he needed someone, too."
Sharon was sleeping with Bucky? His ex-girlfriend was sleeping with Bucky? "Sharon, he's twelve!"
Bucky's voice drifted up from behind them. "I was already sixteen when we met."
"He's not twelve," Sharon said, "and anyway, Stark is about the most fucked-up person I have ever met, so don't judge me."
"I'd never judge you," Steve told her. "You're both my family." He gave her a very brief hug, one arm around her shoulders. Sharon leaned against him for a single moment, closing her eyes, then pulled away.
"So, have you told Sam yet?" she asked conversationally. "Because when you do, I want to be there to watch."
"Told me what?" Sam asked from behind them.
Steve smiled, and didn't answer. Red Skull was gone, he was with his family, and they were going home.
And when they got back, Tony was going to be there, and he was going to be fine. Steve refused to consider any other possibilities.
As always, thanks to everyone who reviewed, favorites-listed, or otherwise commented on or encouraged us over the past nine chapters.