A/N: Part 2 of Presence and Absence.
Disclaimer: I own nothing Marvel.
Presence
Natasha advanced ungracefully to where she remembered the path veering off. After being thrown into a large tree trunk she is unsteady and dazed, limbs ach deeply as if something constricted every molecule that made her whole.
On instinct she knows the comms are down, but tried anyways. "This is Black Widow, anyone copy?"
Not even static disrupts the sounds of tropical forest deep in every crevice and leaf around, the heavy air permeating the spaces between strands of hair and the cracks in the trees bark. Something moves in the branches above her head, nestled in intertwined vines the sunlight is too weak to reach. It is hot, but she does not notice so much as see the heat among the dewdrops falling sporadically, she feels with trembling fingertips the humidity condensate on her neck. Natasha's hands quiver not from fear of being left alone in a tropical hell, but that she is alone.
She can't see nor hear her teammates.
This feels planned. The clue is in the echo of her voice as she shouts out their names- no doubt the enemy has already escaped with one or more of the Avengers. She has been scanning for movement other than indigenous species for what feels like hours, when her feet have only taken her a few yards into the brush.
Just beyond the dense shoulder-high fauna lining the thin path to her right lays a break in the trees, a small clearing. There's pieces of shrapnel lying here and there, Natasha passes a tree embedded with chunks of metal and nails in sparse patter.
"Anyone?" She keeps her voice level, professional. I am alive, basically unhurt. Keep a cool head, they may be fine. Even as she repeats the words over and over, they are becoming faint, less realistic as she walks down the path both ways, searching for any signs bodies had been dragged, or footprints left in the soft soil not covered by moss.
With no alternative and sensing no danger in the immediate area- the bomb intended to wipe the team out had already gone off- Natasha sits on a soft patch of moss covering a large tree root to catch her breath. Natasha pulls out her gun, wondering why she hadn't thought of checking earlier. It feels lighter, and her frantic search turns up no clip in the gun. They had taken her bullets. "That was a little forward of them." Natasha can't help feeling violated by it, but it does make sense. Since when did enemies get smart about this stuff? They had even taken the concealed knife in her boot.
Before she can decide which way to follow the tracks, which seem to go in every direction and Clint had always been the expert tracker, Natasha hears a faint sound of whispering.
Not whispering, shouting!
She stands, hand holding the unhelpful gun at her side.
"Tony! Lady Natasha!"
It was Thor, shouting from a great distance away. How the god got so far away didn't cross her mind, and Natasha called back in the biggest voice she could muster with a parched throat and dry lips. "Thor! Over here!"
Not wasting time, Thor wielded him hammer after hearing lady Natasha reply to his call, darting up beyond the canopy of trees and landing not far from SHIELDs assassin. Thor set Moljnir on the ground at their feet between them. Still blinking stars from his vision, seeing the Lady Natasha had been waiting patiently, Thor looks around. "I am not familiar with that technology. It threw me a great distance."
"It was a dirty bomb. Someone didn't want us to leave with the memory drive." Natasha saw that Thor was without his red cape, and one shoulder had been ripped of its cloth, exposing the tears of flesh in his arm. It had stopped bleeding, but was deep enough for Natasha so ask to inspect it and remove the debris.
As she worked, they both kept an ear out for others, either friend or foe. Natasha also filled Thor in on what a bomb was, especially the ones bad guys filled with nails and other projectiles. A nail had been pushed into Thor's arm, and luckily hadn't hit major arteries. Not that Natasha was knowledgeable in Asgardian anatomy; it was safer to assume they were built close to the same.
The monkeys whose abundant calls were all they could hear before the detonation were scared into silence, that or- "Not good." Natasha stood, realizing her mistake too late. Those had not been monkeys hooting earlier but something more intelligent, almost clever. Someone is watching us.
"Clint! Steve!" She hissed loudly, gesturing for Thor to stand and help her search along the path.
Tony Stark hadn't asked for much in his life. He took what he needed, created, developed everything that he could touch or imagine.
He could not create a life, or a friend such as Steve Rogers. A friend of that quality could not be developed or fixed by a simple engineer with a broken suit. Nor could Tony do anything if he remained sitting there almost waiting for Steve to give up the act, sit up and start issuing out commands like the goddamn soldier he was.
The fire and rage that had been building up was almost eating him from the inside out. All of this effort, all of this hurt was due to one small disk drive that Tony guessed had been made in the nineties. What could possibly be on it that had Fury so short with everyone, so insistent that it was held sensitive information?
Let's find out.
Grabbing his suit and scraping it along the floor, he ripped open the chest plate and dug inside, removing the fasteners and bolts with his good hand. Soon the hand blasters popped out, soon to be connected directly to his arc reactor, with wires coming out from under his shirt. It was so haphazard a job that the exposed wires burned his chest and stomach where they hung, but Tony did not notice.
His attention was the buildup of energy glowing on the small light pads he held against his palms.
With one last look to Steve, eyes fluttering in and out of consciousness, Tony Stark took one last look at his mangled suit and started searching for Cap's shield. When it looked as though their captors had taken it with them, Tony was at a boiling point.
No shield meant he wasn't able to protect himself. He would have to rapid fire at anyone who aimed a gun at him. This meant Tony would have no mercy for whoever stood on the other side of the buildings only door.
He at first stood listening, could hear them speaking in soft tones he hadn't heard from in the middle of the room. They were laughing, sharing jokes and Tony could smell the tobacco smoke filtering in through the large gaps between the door and its hinges.
What are they waiting for? Thinking of the many reasons they were still standing guard, and not just one or two of them, an entire group of the evil sons-of-bitches, soon turned into, What am I waiting for? Not for Captain America to die from blood loss and internal bleeding, and certainly not for the rest of his team, who could be holed up somewhere worse with the real torturers.
"You're telling me the man who built the Iron Man suit in a desert cave can't pick handcuffs?"
He's right, I can do this.
Tony stood back, took a few deep breaths and blasted the door off its hinges. Between shouts of surprise and gunfire aimed in his general direction, Tony Stark began blasting at anyone who moved, his anger escalating with every kickback of the blasters and advance of his steps out of the building.
Through the hazy smoke, Tony did not notice the faint blue light of his reactor dimming beneath his torn shirt. Nor that Steve Rogers had been startled awake inside the small room, and on hearing gunfire and not seeing Stark, shouted, "Tony!"
Natasha held a hand up, stalling Thor as they walked along the thin path. Every few steps they would stop to listen, but Natasha had not stopped Thor for that reason.
This time she could hear something.
"Natasha?" It came from above, on a steep incline to their left. To their right was the large cliff drop and a road somewhere below that where they had heard vehicles go by a few hours before. Then another voice, farther away from the first. "See anyone, Clint?"
"Banner!" Thor boomed, looking up to scan the horizon of the incline where trees were rooted into its face, the wet soil falling every so often as an animal disturbed the surface. A large chunk of rock and dirt rolled over the edge to land at the base of a tree with roots above the surface, and Natasha veered off the path to stand on the roots knee. It did not raise her from the ground a lot, just enough to see a hand grab a branch on the other side of the hill and a dirty blonde head pop up. The owner of the boot which had dislodged a large amount of soil to come raining down on top of Natasha's head.
"Sorry, Nat." Clint turned his head to shout back at Bruce, and soon the scientist's head joined Clint's looking over the drop.
"Are you two hurt? I have my medical bag."
Natasha looked for the usual signs that Bruce had transformed into the Hulk, the dark bags and white lips, but there was nothing. He was wearing the same black SHIELD pants and shirt he had been on the Quinjet. "They didn't take that from you?"
"No, but they did take Clint's weapons." Bruce quietly mentioned, and quickly hopped down off the hill, the roots Natasha stood on stopping his slide. She helped him up and directed him to a beaming Thor to take a look at the gods arm.
Natasha caught Clint's pout before he too jumped over the hill, landing expertly on the root she stood on.
"Haven't seen Steve or Tony by any chance?" She asked, keeping one ear listening to Bruce and Thor chatting away quietly, and the other for movement beyond the radius they could see.
"Nothing. There were tracks, leading away from where Bruce and I ended up, but they covered them well. Think they got separated too?" it was a dry comment, for they both knew Steve and Tony were likely dragged off somewhere. It looked as if after the bomb had dropped them all out cold, they were all dragged in separate directions, divided to be conquered.
Clint began weaving his way back to the path, clapping Thor on his good shoulder as he passed, eyes searching the trees for what he could not hear. It was too silent, like the animals had been scared away from that area.
Natasha picked a spot to sit and wait for Bruce to finish bandaging Thor's arm. "Steve had the disk drive. Tony is too strong an opponent, they either took him or the suit."
"They were closest to the explosion. This was not a random explosion." When Clint has first woken up to see Bruce equally dazed and looking around, his first thought was they waited. "They waited for Steve and Cap to be closest,"
Natasha was interrupted by Bruce tensing. The ground had shaken, and Natasha braced herself for an earthquake, very common in the region they were in. When another shake pounded the forest floor, All of them including Thor picked up the pattern.
Bruce began packing his simple medic bag, "Explosions." He strung the bag across his back, waiting for Clint to tell them what he saw.
Now they could hear them, closer than a mile off. Clint squinted through his tinted glasses, having a hard time seeing through the trees what the source was. They were white, setting the brush on fire.
"Repulsor blasts!" Clint took off running with Natasha at his heels. Thor took up his hammer and shot through the canopy, seeing the clearing his team was running for. Shouting down through the trees, "It is Stark!" Wasting no time flying towards his friend.
When Bruce got there, all he could smell was singed flesh and the burning stench of rubber, where Tony had shot at a jeep parked near the line of trees. There was a dirt path winding down behind the rotting building, taking it along the cliff before dropping steeply down. The building was on the edge of the drop, the door to it blasted off and smoking beside a dead body. Natasha had dragged out a runner hiding in the trees into the open for interrogation, binding his hands behind his back with the man's own bootlaces. Clint had rummaged in the jeep that wasn't smoking, finding a radio to contact SHIELD and their pilot.
Thor was kneeling beside Steve, where Tony had dragged him out to lean in the doorway. The Captain was barely conscious, and Bruce inspected him first.
"He has… had nails in his chest, Bruce. I pulled them…" Tony looked too exhausted to continue, so Bruce let his sentence drop off.
"Glad we found you two."
Tony offered one last smirk, "Present and accounted for, doc."
Bruce shone a light in Steve's eyes. "Not a doctor, Tony." And checked his pulse. The wounds weren't bleeding any longer, but Steve needed real medical attention. Bruce feared one of the nails had punctured a lung.
"You're the only one we got."
"And you're the only asshole we have, so stop being reckless." Bruce meant his words to have a bite, but it was lost in his relieved smile that Tony was managing a conversation. "No complaining when I ask to see that hand."
"Aye aye."
Clint interrupted their banter, "The Quinjet will be here soon. Fury wants to know if we have the disk." The archer tried not making eye contact with Tony, not wanting to accuse him of losing it when it was clear under the circumstances the guy did the best he could. Instead, Clint looked at Steve's pale face and the glean of cold sweat there. The guy looked worse for wear.
"No, their leader took it." His broken tone did Tony no favours, with the injuries Stark clearly had it became apparent that whoever pushed broke his hand of pushed him into it deserved what he had done to them. The evidence of Stark's breaking point lay all around them.
Tony didn't speak again until they boarded the Quinjet, and even then it was only to answer their questions of what had happened.
Tony did not make eye-contact until he told Fury, on the Helicarrier, what happened for the third time that day. By the time they were boarding to go back to Stark Tower with one less team member, Tony had shut down completely.
They blame me.
Tony thinks it's his fault that Natasha won't stop glancing at him as she lifts the Quinjet into the air.
He thinks Thor is fidgeting because he is leaving a comrade in arms behind, because of him.
He honestly believes Bruce won't look him in the face because of what he allowed to happen.
Steve almost died; they almost lost a part of their family.
What Tony doesn't realize is that Natasha can't stop thinking about the moment she saw Tony drag Steve out of the outpost building. Thor can't stomach looking at the bruises and scratches Tony didn't notice he had marring his face, or the hand wrapped heavily in bandages that blood still managed to leak and stain through the pristine white. Bruce just can't handle the anger he's feeling towards the organization that did this to his friends.
Clint just wants to redo the last seventy two hours, pretend that the silence on the jet is nothing compared to the chaos they'd escaped. The absence of a friend is worse.
A/N: End of the two-part oneshot. I might follow up with what was on the disk drive and if they find it, but this story is done for now.
I have another oneshot I'm planning to post next Tuesday!
*Also, my multi-chapter fic has had a name change. It's now Upon Command and not Drinkin' Beer and Wastin' Bullets.