Warnings: language, mention of drug use, mad scientists.
Thanks to irite for keeping me on my toes in terms of plot holes.
I do not own The Avengers. But I will on Tuesday. On Blu-Ray...
For almost an hour, Bruce stood in the basement of the cabin trying to find a position that was just 'uncomfortable' instead of 'unbearable.' With one arm fastened to a pipe above his head, his options were limited, but he eventually twisted in a way that had his arm resting against the top of his head, and that ended up being his best choice.
Once he got settled, he set to pondering the possible implications of the numerous barrels of the toxic chemical on the other side of the room.
He had a few hypotheses. None of them boded particularly well. The huge amount of the toxic chemical, plus his kidnapping at gunpoint, plus the somewhat deranged way that Lucas had talked about "getting the others," mostly led to a lot of really bad conclusions.
Bruce tried really hard to think of a situation in which all of this could coalesce into something that didn't end in probable death and destruction (although probably not mine, Bruce thought with a smirk), but he couldn't, and in the end he had to concede that this was, in all likelihood, going to go very, very badly.
A few minutes after Bruce had come to that conclusion, Lucas descended into the basement with another man in tow. Bruce did not recognize him. The pair conversed quietly for a moment in what sounded like Russian before slowly approaching and circling him cautiously.
Their caution seemed a little ridiculous. After all, he wasn't Clint or Natasha; his acrobatic abilities were pretty much non-existent, so it wasn't like he could do a lot of damage in his current fastened-to-the-plumbing state. And if he did get it in his head to do some damage, their caution would be completely useless.
Really, when you thought about it that way, it was kind of audacious that they were doing this at all. What kind of ego did it take to kidnap and then hold hostage someone who could easily smash his captors and then obliterate half of the damn forest on top of it?
Bruce, who was rapidly losing patience with the situation, decided to point this out. "You know, I'm not really sure what you're doing, but I think you're depending an awful lot on the assumption that I'm not going to get...angry."
Lucas growled dismissively, "Shut up, Banner," and then resumed his conversation with his companion.
It was definitely in Russian.
But now Bruce was downright annoyed, and completely dumbfounded at the idiocy of these morons. It defied reason. No one could really be stupid enough to do this.
Still, he was a scientist, and he liked to collect information before jumping to conclusions. So he went fishing. "You're serious? Really. Give me one good reason why I shouldn't just break out of here."
Lucas rolled his eyes and glared at him. "There's a nearby civilian population, Banner. A town, about a mile farther north. Women, children, puppies, the whole nine yards. Wouldn't want them to get hurt, am I right? So you'd better just sit tight."
Bruce scowled. He had no way of knowing if that was true or not, and he couldn't risk it until he did. His control had been getting better, but it still wasn't to a point that he'd be comfortable rampaging around children. Damn it.
"Anyway, it shouldn't be too much longer 'til your friends get here. They should get to the lake where I dropped your phone in another hour or so, then it's not much farther. I imagine Stark would have eventually worked out where we went; he's pretty smart. But I left some pretty obvious clues just in case. Had to make sure they all made it here; I wouldn't want them to miss the fun."
Huh. Apparently Lucas wasn't nearly as stupid as Bruce had assumed. He'd let Bruce hold on to his phone for as long as he had because he'd been leading the other Avengers along, not because he was completely incompetent. And if he wasn't completely incompetent, then he might actually be competent, and that meant that he might actually be a legitimate threat.
Great. Now he's back up to 'potential evil genius' instead of 'useless henchman.' That's just wonderful.
Lucas turned away from Bruce and led his Russian companion over to the barrels. They conversed, and gestured, and after a few more minutes they both headed back upstairs. This time, Lucas shut off the light, and Bruce found himself in complete darkness.
He sighed.
"Okay, okay...stop. Here." Natasha pulled off the road, and Tony shoved his phone into his pocket and hopped out of the car. In the two hours they'd been driving, the sun had gone down and the forest around them was completely dark and silent except for the splash of headlights against the trees and the low rumbling of the idling engine.
The others followed him, and Natasha opened up the trunk and dug around, emerging a moment later with flashlights. She handed them out.
"Stark. What's the situation?"
Tony pulled his phone out again, examined the screen, then shined his flashlight up ahead. "There's a path up there; I think it goes down to the lake."
Steve nodded, taking charge. "All right. Why don't you and Thor head down and check it out? Natasha and I will see if we can find any clues up here. If you're not back in ten minutes, we'll come looking for you."
Tony rolled his eyes. It was so typical of Steve to stick him and Thor together when he knew that they got along about as well as sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide. Still, he beckoned for the demigod to follow. "Come on, hammer time, let's go see if Bruce drowned." He headed towards the path.
"Wait, aren't you going to suit up first?" Steve asked.
Tony rolled his eyes again. "Not if I'm going to have to get back in the car in five minutes. Have you ever tried to get comfortable wearing a full suit of armor? It just doesn't fucking happen."
Steve had to concede that he had never tried, and decided to take Tony's (unnecessarily vulgar) word. "Okay. But be careful."
"You're sending me with a damn demigod for a bodyguard, Rogers, I think we'll be fine."
The pair disappeared into the woods, and Steve could hear Tony not-so-patiently trying to explain the cultural significance of the phrase "hammer time." Steve shook his head—he personally didn't understand half the things that Tony said, but he admired Thor's efforts towards comprehension.
With Natasha, he walked up and down the stretch of road, trying to find some useful piece of evidence. Their search didn't reveal anything except some faint tire tracks by the side of the road, so they made their way back to the parked car.
Tony was leaning casually against it with a small rectangle of paper in his hand while Thor stood next to him, holding Tony's phone in the air over his head. It made for an interesting picture.
Steve walked up to the billionaire. "What's up?"
"Bruce's dead body isn't in the lake. So that's good. I was just getting ready to hack some government satellites to track any movement through this stretch of forest in the last two hours, but that plan was rendered unnecessary by this." He held up the paper.
It was a receipt, made out to Dr. John Lucas, for a car rental. Some kind of industrial van, from the looks of it.
"So we know he was here," Steve noted. "But how is this useful?"
Tony pointed at the bottom of the receipt. "It has his phone number on it. One that he never gave to SHIELD."
Natasha butted in. "How do you know that?"
Tony quirked an eyebrow. Natasha decided that she didn't really want to know when, why, or how Stark had managed to get into their records.
Steve still didn't know how this was useful information. "Okay, so...?"
Tony heaved a huge sigh. "Rogers. Really? Clearly, he wanted to keep this number secret—he never gave it to SHIELD. So, it's like his secret-evil-criminal-cell number, right? He's probably got that phone on him right now. I just need to trace its location. Which I'm doing." He gestured at Thor. "Data signal out here is pretty bad, though, so Thor's lending a hand."
"How much longer must I remain in this position, Stark?" Thor inquired with remarkable patience.
Tony craned his neck and peered up at the phone. "You're done. Hand it over."
Thor obliged. Tony tapped a few things on the screen. "Great. Got a location. Let's go."
"Wait," Natasha said. "Doesn't this seem awfully...convenient?"
"What do you mean, Romanoff?"
"That this was just sitting there, waiting for us." She looked at Steve. "How do we know it's not a trap?"
They all considered that in silence. Tony spoke up first, "Well, if it's a trap, is there really anything we can do about it? It's the only lead we have. Otherwise we're just going to keep sitting in the middle of this damn forest all night."
Steve nodded. "He's right." The admittance was clearly hard to make, but Steve persevered. "We'll keep moving. If it's a trap...we'll handle it."
That was the kind of plan that Tony could appreciate. "Great! Let's go." He hopped back into the car, as did the others, albeit with more reluctance.
Natasha tried to ignore her growing sense of foreboding as they closed in on their destination.
For the sixth time in two hours, Clint was questioning his decision to operate a motor vehicle.
He had been half an hour or so behind the others when he started, but they had stopped for gas and gotten stuck in a traffic jam he missed, and then he had exceeded the speed limit rather egregiously, so he had mostly caught up with them after an hour. He had been keeping pretty far back for awhile so that his headlights didn't give him away.
However, the other car had stopped, and it took him an inordinate amount of time to notice. Consequently, he had just nearly blown his own cover.
It was only the latest clue of many that indicated he had no business operating heavy machinery.
He'd almost fallen asleep, of all things, twice. Apparently driving was very soothing, and he knew that his body was exhausted from all of the shit he'd been putting it through. So even if his mind viewed sleep as something immensely undesirable, his body had a different idea. And it was getting really hard to ignore.
Another rather unequivocal hint that maybe he should have taken the bus or something had come about an hour into the drive, when he'd gotten so distracted by the series of fucking annoying songs on the radio that he'd nearly gone careening into ditch before he remembered, 'Oh yeah, I'm driving.'
And half an hour after that, someone had cut him off and then slowed down to 45 m.p.h., and that sent him into a fit of rage that nearly ended in a homicide. Although Clint liked to believe that he wouldn't have really shot the other driver (or even her front tires), even if a gun had somehow found a way into his hand.
Yeah, he shouldn't have been driving. He knew that. He knew he was strung out, something that was only becoming harder to ignore with the passing time. What had been an unpleasant set of symptoms two hours ago was rapidly escalating into 'fucking unbearable' now, and his shaking, sweating, and ceaseless throbbing headache were making it really hard to manage the basics.
Like staying on the road, for example. And if he couldn't do that, he had no idea how he was going manage the more arduous events the night surely had in store.
Unless, of course, he...
No. Not yet. He was determined to make it through all the way to midnight before he gave in.
Although, how much difference was there between 10:45 and midnight really?
He had gritted his teeth against that thought and redoubled his efforts at not falling apart, which had distracted him from the task at hand, which had led to him nearly give himself away. A series of truly unfortunate events. But Clint managed to not blow his cover, somehow, which he attributed more to luck than to any particular skill on his part, and he parked and waited patiently until the little dot on his GPS began moving again before slowly following. Clint was surprised they had gotten new bearings so quickly, but then he figured that Tony had found some overly complicated way to track Bruce's exact location. That man could do some frightening things with technology.
As he drove, Clint briefly considered suggesting to the billionaire that he have all of the Avengers microchipped with GPS tags in case this ever happened again.
Smirking at the idea, Clint tracked the other car as it wound through the forest. They traveled for half an hour and almost 30 miles from the lake before they stopped abruptly.
This time, Clint noticed immediately.
He was maybe half a mile back. He considered driving closer, but decided against it, instead pulling off the road. He watched the GPS for another five minutes, but the other car didn't move again, and so Clint decided that this was probably their destination. He made a note of the coordinates and grabbed a flashlight from the glovebox—he didn't intend to use it, but it might come in handy. Then, he got out of the car and grabbed his gear from the back seat.
When he went for his bag, his hand hovered over the pouch containing his pills.
Forty-five more minutes, that's all. Fucking Christ, Barton, stop being so damn pathetic.
Easier said than done, really, but he didn't reach in for his pills and he considered that a damn good start.
Clint moved quickly down the road. He wasn't careless, though; he stayed alert, listening for the sounds of approaching cars or people. The forest around him was quiet. Even the cricket chirps were few and far between. Still, he focused intensely, well, at least as intensely as he was able, making sure that he remained obscured in the shadows and moved silently. He checked his handheld GPS unit frequently to make sure he didn't overshoot his goal.
He had made it all the way to the foot of the lengthy driveway when he heard a gun go off.
Bruce watched with some apprehension as Lucas led two big, burly guys into the basement. Lucas made a vague gesture towards the barrels and instructed them, "Be careful, okay? We don't want to have an incident." The two men nodded and lifted one of the barrels between them, bringing it upstairs. They returned a moment later for another, continuing in this vein until they'd taken about half of the barrels.
"That's it, boss," said one of the men on their last return. "Can't fit no more."
Lucas waved him off. "Thanks. We'll take care of it from here. Why don't you go wait for our guests?"
The pair obediently returned upstairs, taking another one of the barrels with them.
When they had gone, Lucas turned and smiled at Bruce. "We're about to get started. Do you want to go first, or do you want to let your friends try it out for you?"
Neither option sounded particularly appealing. "Try what out, exactly?"
Instead of answering, Lucas walked to the other side of the room. He rummaged around in a box sitting on the ground next to the barrels, pulling out a rubber apron, a pair of heavy-duty elbow-length rubber gloves, and a plastic face shield, all of which he donned.
Bruce had a sudden bad feeling that he knew where this was going. Still, he asked, "What are you doing? And where's your Russian friend?"
Without turning, Lucas said, "Oh, him? He's waiting upstairs. He prefers to leave the hands on stuff to us peons. Kind of an asshole, really, but he's been useful."
"Yeah? What's he done for you?"
Lucas faced him abruptly. "Do you have any idea how dangerous you are, Banner?"
That was a stupid question. "Of course I do, I'm—"
Lucas interrupted. "Not just you. All of the 'Avengers.' Fucking superheroes, right? What is that, anyway?"
Bruce considered pointing out that personally, he was more of an unfortunate lab accident than a superhero, but he refrained. It seemed like Lucas was finally ready to monologue, and Bruce wanted to hear every word.
"So you all come in to save the world, like it never occurred to you that fighting a god with an alien army was bound to be a bad fucking idea."
"Well, compared to the alternative—"
"Shut up, Banner. The alternative? What, the subjugation of the human race? Yeah, that might have sucked. But it might have been okay. And my family might still be alive instead of being crushed underneath the south wall of our apartment. Right?"
Well, that explained at least some of this. "I'm sorry for your loss, but you should really blame Loki—"
"Shut up, Banner."
Bruce was getting really tired of hearing that.
Lucas continued, "Loki? Please. If you hadn't fought him, half of Manhattan wouldn't have been destroyed. You fucking superheroes are a damn menace, and soon the public will know it like I do."
Lucas pulled several large syringes out of the box on the floor and, wrenching the top off of one of the barrels, carefully filled them with the thick liquid. He capped them. "You know what? Why don't you just wait here for your friends? I think that'll work best, after all. We're going to run into town for a few things. You should all come by later. I imagine it'll be...illuminating."
Without waiting for Bruce's response, he shed his protective gear (except for the gloves) and went back upstairs.
Bruce was, somehow, not at all surprised when he heard a gunshot a few moments later.
"This is it," Tony said, peering at the address marker by the side of the road.
Natasha drove past.
"Romanoff, that was it."
"Stark, we're not going to pull into the driveway. We're aiming for subtle."
Tony huffed and pointed at Steve, who was decked out in his star-spangled uniform, and Thor, who was wearing his battle armor. "I don't really think we've achieved that goal." He gestured towards the bracelets adorning his wrists, and added, "I don't really do subtle, either."
She glanced in the rearview mirror, and Steve shrugged apologetically. "He's right, Natasha."
With a sigh, she pulled over and threw the car into park. "Fine. Everyone out."
They exited the car and took a few moments to get adjusted. Tony finally got into his suit, Natasha checked her weapons and then, following Steve's lead, they all backtracked to the driveway.
At least, Natasha thought, They are attempting to walk quietly.
She found that she suddenly missed Clint terribly. Because he appreciated the need for stealth and could move through terrain almost silently. Unlike these idiots.
A twig snapped nearby. Natasha whipped around to glare at Tony, or Steve, or Thor, but they all looked as surprised as she did. "What—"
They were all suddenly completely doused in something sticky, something tacky, something that felt an awful lot like...congealed blood.
An empty barrel crashed to the ground nearby.
Oh, shit.
Natasha whipped her gun from its holster and fired a shot into the trees above them, where the liquid had come from. She was rewarded with a groan, and a man fell to the ground in front of them, clutching his arm. Natasha dispatched him with a quick kick to the head.
The branches above them rustled and another man jumped out of the tree. He landed heavily and tried to run, but Steve took him down with his shield.
Panting, Natasha looked around, but the silence around them was complete.
Until the door on the garage attached to the house opened, headlights flooded the area, and a large van peeled out of the garage and down the driveway, nearly taking the group out.
They dodged it. Stunned by the near-miss, they watched the van whip down the driveway.
"What the fuck just happened?" Tony asked, trying (and failing) to get the viscous liquid off his faceplate. He put the faceplate up, jerking away as the liquid ran down his face. He wiped at it frantically. "What is this shit? Is it the shit?"
"Yeah, I have a funny feeling it is," Steve said, pulling out a flashlight and peering at his soaked uniform. "It's...green, though. Is it supposed to be green?"
No one had an answer for him.
"This is very strange," Thor declared after a moment's silence. "If these people have kidnapped Dr. Banner, why would they want to give us a weapon to use against them? My brother says this substance is a powerful elixir and will give us immense power."
Tony was always prepared with a hypothesis. "It's massively unpredictable, maybe—"
But Steve had a more pressing concern and interrupted him. "If these people kidnapped Bruce, did they just get away with him again? Let's check the house. We can try and figure out what's going on after we do that."
The others nodded, and so they made their way into the house. They checked the ground floor and upstairs, but it was apparently deserted. They were about to leave when Tony noticed a door in the kitchen that led down into the basement.
Where Bruce was standing, chained to a pipe, looking very patient.
"The fuck, Banner? Were you going to yell for help, or were you cool with just hanging out here all night?"
Bruce shrugged, as much as he could in his current position. "Sorry. I figured you'd come down here eventually. I didn't want to draw anyone else's attention..."
As he was talking, Natasha was working on picking the lock on his handcuffs. After a few seconds, she had freed him. He rubbed his wrist, then peered at the assembled Avengers.
"Are you all covered in that crap?" he asked, gesturing to the barrels on the other side of the room and looking just a little panicked.
"Indeed, Banner, and it is most odd."
Bruce had actually begun to wring his hands. He chuckled nervously, "Not really."
"The Chitauri's blood is most potent, Dr. Banner, and will grant us great strength against our enemy—"
Bruce cut him off, and it was so uncharacteristic that everyone else froze to listen. "Chitauri blood. That's what this is? Well, I guess it doesn't matter. What matters is that Lucas is heading towards civilization. I'm not sure what he's going to do once he gets there, but it's not going to be good—he's completely lost it. And he's just made sure that it's going to be damn hard for you guys to stop him." He stopped, then with a look of dawning comprehension exclaimed, "Oh, it makes perfect sense!"
No one else seemed to agree. Bruce decided to spell it out, since they hadn't had the benefit of hearing Lucas's monologue. "Look. Lucas is nuts. He thinks we killed his family, and he's trying to prove how dangerous superheroes are. So he doused you in this chemical that'll make it so everything you touch explodes or ignites, possibly including people. And now he's going to wreak some kind of havoc that we have to stop."
Tony picked up where Bruce had left off as Lucas' plan became clear. "Except if we try to stop him, we're going to end up causing all kinds of damage and destruction and mayhem. And if we don't try to stop him, then we look ineffectual and useless. It's a lose-lose; either way he wins...But you haven't been exposed, Bruce, why don't you just go smash him and stop this shit?"
Bruce chuckled again. "But damage-destruction-mayhem might as well be my middle name. So, I can't go stop him, not on my own. I'm just as likely to hurt someone inadvertently as all of you are, and he'll still win."
"Hold on," Steve spoke up. "No one's doing any smashing. We shouldn't do anything until we contact Fury. We're not here to foil some evil plan, we're here to rescue Bruce, and now we have—"
Tony interrupted him. "Is Captain Fucking America seriously saying that we shouldn't go save innocent civilians from God-knows-what? What the hell? Did getting doused in alien body fluids addle your brain—"
"Look, I'm not saying we should do nothing, we just need to check in with Fury, see if he can send back-up. There's probably a protocol for this, is all."
"There is a protocol," Natasha said. "But it's going to take the biohazard response team two hours to get out here, and that's going to be too damn late. If someone's going to stop that psycho before he hurts someone, it's going to have to be us."
"So what you're saying," Tony summarized, "Is that we're fucked."
"Seems that way," Clint observed from where he was leaning heavily against the doorframe.
Clint had not been impressed when he'd nearly been run over in the driveway. The car speeding off into the night hadn't paid him any mind, though, and Clint thought that was just rude. If you nearly kill someone, you should really acknowledge them or something.
Not that you want to be noticed right now.
And that was true. So he'd just continued his way up the driveway towards the house. But the light from the moon was inadequate, and despite his best attempts at focusing he was still completely fucking distracted, so he nearly tripped over the two unconscious men lying near a puddle of...something that was being rapidly absorbed into the ground.
Recovering his balance, he thought, Wow. You're really doing a bang-up job with the spy/assassin gig. Just give it up, Barton. Why the fuck did you think you'd be useful here?
But he refused to listen to himself, even as he acknowledged that he probably had no business being here, that he'd probably been a little rash in heading out this way (You think?). Instead, he maintained his efforts at stealth long enough to creep into the house unnoticed. Of course, he wasn't sure if that was an accomplishment—he didn't know if there was anyone there to notice him. Until he heard voices coming from below.
It was the others.
With a shrug, (because he knew he'd have to deal with them eventually) Clint made his way to the kitchen and found the door to the basement. He went down the stairs, arriving just in time to hear the end of Banner's explanation and Stark's response.
Descending the stairs had made him dizzy, so he leaned against the doorframe to wait for the ground to stop tilting.
Oblivious to Clint's presence, the group continued conversing until Tony finished, "So what you're saying is that we're fucked."
"Seems that way," Clint couldn't help replying. Six damn superheroes in a room and not one of them in any condition for heroics? What were the fucking odds?
The way everyone turned to look at him was almost funny.
Sorry this is late. Life is stupid. I couldn't work up the energy for doing all the micro-editing associated with posting. And I couldn't think of a chapter title.
Thanks to everyone for reviewing/following/favoriting/reading quietly and secretly like a creeper.
This was my longest chapter yet. And this chapter makes "Four Days" my longest story yet. You should celebrate by reviewing.
